Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 12:40:45 +0300 (EET DST) From: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: HOSOKAWA Tatsumi <hosokawa@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, jfieber@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New L10N boot floppy for 2.1.5-RELEASE Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960809120848.13368E-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee> In-Reply-To: <28292.839580908@time.cdrom.com>
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On Fri, 9 Aug 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > 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? Is the open to others aswell? It is more of a theoretical question, as there are way to few FreeBSD users around here, but would it generaly be tolerated/accepted that there could be N international versions of FreeBSD that differ in only say documenttion and possibly the output of some programs (I'm *not* talking about the complete rewrite of the output of all programs, not even translating all the man pages). Let's just say somewhere someone crazy and resourceful enough (and that certainly am not I and it is *not* an offence at the Japanese or anyone else) to make a version of FreeBSD suited to that particular language environment. Provided of course that the person(s) will also maintain it. Will it be possible in such case to keep it all in the CVS repository? And if a Japanese (or whatever) friend of mine comes to visit me, will I be able to specify some tag (say JAPANESE), do a cvs checkout using it on my spare computer, build world and - give for the time s/he stays with me to him/her a compurter running Japanese FreeBSD? Sander PS. This all is just a curious question. I am not going to undertake any such project myself and I don't know any who would. Neither do I have Japanese friends :-( (it's always good having friends). > > Jordan >
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