default link for untranslated books

[Ruediger Landmann]

On 05/27/2010 10:29 AM, Domingo Becker wrote:
>
>> I can see two downsides though:
>>
>> 1. It seems wasteful to have multiple copies of exactly the same content
>> stored on the server. It will also make maintaining the site much more
>> difficult if the site image (web.git) grows to something like 40 times
>> its current size. (although this will no longer be a problem when we
>> move to a fully automated publishing system shortly)
>>
>>      
> No. Just the link.
>    

Yeah, unfortunately just not possible right now. Uploading the book 
multiple times is the only way to do it right now :(

>> 2. At the moment, when you see a book in a language menu, you know that
>> it is translated. The situation is not so bad for widely translated
>> languages, but for less widely translated languages, users will click on
>> links and most will be in English; they might not even discover that
>> *any* books have been translated into their language, so the hard work
>> of the translation team gets lost in a sea of English.
>>
>>      
> A new user would open his/her firefox.
> It will automatically go to his/her locale, es-ES in my case.
> The page for F13 will not show all the books.
> And we have a good set of books, that even though in English, they
> will surely cover his/her problem.
> I don't want him/her to think that we only have the books shown in that page.
> The titles are in English, he/she might think that those are all the
> books we have.
> We have more books than other linux distributions.
>    

Yes, we agree that this is one side of the problem. I was just 
expressing the other side -- presenting a list of books to users as if 
they were in users' own languages, but when they click on a link, they 
discover that the book is in English. They go back to the menu and try 
another book, and it's in English again. And another book -- still English!

When I settle on a solution for presenting the titles of the books in 
the translated language, this part of the problem should go away :) 
Title in menu in English = book in English. Title in menu in Spanish = 
book in Spanish :) Nobody should be surprised :)


>> In case translators have not realised, the menus are now all
>> automatically generated, so it's not possible for us to manually add
>> links any more. I will ask the Publican developer today whether some
>> kind of "cross linking" is possible. Even if this becomes possible, it
>> would solve problem 1 but not problem 2.
>>
>>      
> Would you please ask him to generate a .pot file for a chapter?
> So, if there are n chapters there will only be n .pot files.
> The huge number of .pot files isn't helpful for translation. It even
> makes Tx's life harder. It would also prevent string repetition. To
> see this issue, just run "msgfmt -c *.po" in es-ES, for example.
>
>    

This issue is unrelated to Publican; I'll post an explanation in a 
separate thread.


>> I wonder if a better solution would be for me to add a prominent notice
>> to the "Welcome" page to tell visitors "to see a full list of all
>> documentation, change the language to English"?
>>
>>      
> Probably, but I prefer the link at the left. The user's attention will be there.
>    

Oh yes, I think we all agree that this is best :) It's just a case of 
working out how to make it happen :)

> thank you for your time, Rudi.
>    

And thank you for your hard work and perseverance.

I want to extend a special thank you to Domingo and Daniel from the 
Spanish team -- for F13 they have really been fighting hard to fight off 
technical problems with the Installation Guide in Transifex, and in one 
very tragic incident, lost a lot of their work. I'm sure that everyone 
reading this can understand the horror of that situation :(

Still, they just picked up with what they had left and kept going.

Thanks guys -- your dedication is truly inspiring!

Cheers
Rudi