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To: hosokawa@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp (HOSOKAWA Tatsumi)
cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org, jfieber@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: New L10N boot floppy for 2.1.5-RELEASE 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 09 Aug 1996 17:33:01 +0900."
             <199608090833.RAA24298@frig.mt.cs.keio.ac.jp> 
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 01:55:08 -0700
Message-ID: <28292.839580908@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> I removed some dirty hacks from Makefiles of src/release (you can make
> original English version if you don't define any L10N options in
> src/release/Makafile), and our L10N team finished the extraction of
> "hardcoded" message of sysinstall into external text file.  So, this
> version can be easily extended to support other languages.

Excellent!  I've always had something like this on my TODO list, along
with the floppy docs, FAQ and Handbook.

We still need to work with John Fieber on some scheme of maintaining
multiple parallel language versions of our docs, as well as
eliminating the boot floppy docs and making them subsections of the
handbook instead, or translation work is going to remain brute-force
and overly difficult.

Please don't misunderstand me, either.  I think that the work you and
the L10N team are doing is great, and is something which fills a very
definite short-term need.  I'm just somewhat afraid of having another
``FreeBSD 2.0.5'' where a lot of work was expended in doing
bruce-force translations but almost none at all in implementing the
kind of framework which would have allowed that work to be carried
successfully forward into 2.1 and 2.1.5 (and I blame myself for this
more than anyone else).  As a result, we got one version of FreeBSD
I18N'd when we might have gotten 3 for only a little extra effort.

I will look at your changes to sysinstall and try to merge them back
into -current.  For the documentation, I think it's really time to
decide just what needs to be done and do it.  We've only talked about
doing something for too long, and the emergence of these floppies a
signal to me that the user base is tired of waiting! :-)

John, do you have time for this right now?  Anyone else interested in
engaging on a little architectural discussion on the side?

						Jordan