Which place for docs in French, German, etc?

[Michel LAVAUD]

To: TWG-TDS@SHSU.edu
Subject: Re: Which place for docs in French, German, etc?


Karl BERRY wrote:

> > Of course, one could also have a different type of organization:
> >     disseminated in the whole doc tree. It would be interesting to
> >     have the opinion of other non-English speaking people ?
> 
> I hope English speakers are also allowed to reply :-).

Ah yes, sorry for my bad English, I meant "have also the opinion of
non-English speaking people"  (and sorry if this is still bad English :-))

 > documentation (say for a TV set) in several languages, say Dutch,
 > English, French, German, Japanese etc., you have usually the
 > 
 > 1 - Chapter one
 >   Dutch
 >   English
 >   French
 >   German

> excuse me, but i do see that arrangment on my microwave instructions :-}

Sorry, Sebastian, I apologize: my statement was to bald indeed.
(BTW, I heard that a woman put her dog into a microwave oven to
have it dried; maybe she had this model and she couldn't find the
page where this practice is discouraged ? :-})

> I can't say I'm excited about another directory level under doc/, but
> maybe it makes sense.

A few advantages I see, if all doc for a given language is in its
own subdirectory :

- when making installation on hard disk, user can delete docs in
languages he don't know, by performing "rm -r" or "delete" in the
corresponding directories. For example, if an English user don't
read/need French doc, he can delete it with rm -r doc/french/*.
But If doc in all languages sit in on subdir, it is not trivial
(with usual OS commands) to get rid of French doc, especially if
directory names are not homogeneous, sometimes frFAQ, sometimes
package/french.

- when using doc from a CD-ROM or from a network disk, a French
user can access all French doc by assigning a disk with name L:
to directory doc/french (with subst L: doc/french on PC, or mount
doc/french for network disk, etc.), and he will see only doc in
French on this disk. With the same CD-ROM, a German user could
assign this disk L: to German directory and he will see only
German doc (For docs not available in German or French, assign
disk M: to English doc).

If doc is organized the other way, everybody will see docs in all
languages mixed together. As long as there is almost no doc
available in other languages than English, no problem. But if
many docs will become available in other languages, users could
find it tedious to find what they need.

> but i dont have any very strong feelings on this. i just stipulate
> that the number of directory levels remain constant, so that
> lots of things move down one to doc/english

To keep directory names shorter for TDS, maybe it would be better
to use the two letters "fr" for French subdir, "de" for German,
"es" for Spanish etc. as used in Internet addresses, instead of
"german" or "deutsch", or "french" or "francais", and add a file
languages.txt that contains the list

  de  deutsch   german
  fr  francais  french
  es  espanol   spanish

etc? In this case: for english, I don't know what could be used,
en? uk? us?


Michel Lavaud  (lavaud@univ-orleans.fr)