Re: Man Pages in Arabic (AMAN)

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 04:03:06PM -0700, Anmar Oueja wrote:
> 
> Man when I looked into this, it is abig job but it is alot of fun though 
> so here are some of my concerns and suggestions.

Good ;) Now you have an idea of how big this can get ;)

> - need a Howto that explains how to tranlate the english man pages

I'm not sure what you mean by that. I would lean toward importing the sgml
version of man pages to CVS -- so it would be a matter of translating the
already existing paragraphs/sentences while maintaining the same format. Not
much of a howto there, IMHO.

> - need a repository that shows all the translated man pages

That would easily be provided once we import the initial documents to cvs.
Probably under translate/man. We would then need to start the project
officially, giving it a project page and some kind of status indicator (will
worry about that later).

> - given the shear number of man pages, we should have a way for people 
> to request the man pages they think will be most usefull

I would not recommend that. That is what I mean by saying, "take the lead".
That is, find what's out there, and provide a list of what you see as an
important priority. You would then give your recommendations on what is to be
worked on (those recommendations would be followed by tradition as we've had
with, say.. kde and gnome translation -- but not strictly enforced to allow
for flexibility).

Once you provide your initial list, there can be a discussion on it, or an
acceptance and we move on to the actual work.

> - a doc explaining how to setup the Arabic man pages on an english linux 
> system

Hrmm. I would rather have a script that would install the man pages and
provide a little README file with it to explain what it does and how it does
it.

The less people have to read to be able to do things the better it is.

> -  and the most important of all, is the process man pages have to go 
> through to release the man pages as they become available. (we need to 
> certify the  pages for correctness and grammer (yuk))
> 

Yes, that's why I asked about the source of the man pages. To be honest, I
have no idea where they are maintained. We would have to arrange for a sync
with that particular cvs repository with ours (this is what we do with the KDE
and Gnome translations -- but I would imagine this would be a slightly
different setup). I will take care of that part when we get to it.

>[..]

> Section The human readable name
>    1    User commands that may be started by everyone.

I would think this would be the first on the list naturally ;)

>    2    System calls, that is, functions provided by the kernel.
>    3    Subroutines, that is, library functions.
>    4    Devices, that is, special files in the /dev directory.
>    5    File format descriptions, e.g. /etc/passwd.
>    6    Games, self-explanatory.
>    7    Miscellaneous, e.g. macro packages, conventions.
>    8    System administration tools that only root can execute.
>    9    Another (Linux specific) place for kernel routine documentation.
> 

You are the man here ;)

later
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