[GRASS5] GDP and French action

[mose]

yo

After long threads of private discussion with Moritz Lennert and Eric
Lemerse, I now feel urge to publicly communicate what resulted. 

It's all about the shameful lack of decent french documentation for
Grass, thus about the documentation and translation effort from
french-speaking people.

Moritz warned us that he won't have enough time to deal with the
necessities of that coordination. I wish I will be able to fulfill that
role, with his help, and Eric support.

We distinguish 2 different axes for our reflexion :


1 - Grass Documentation Project
---------------------------------
In a positive effort to give Grass the documentation it deserves (and
also because so many people complain about lack of it), there are many
parts of existing documentation that has to be translated. Our concern
is to help in that process.

Moritz reported about DocBook would be a good choice for compatility,
and maybe even for translation using getxml (that I don't know at all).

I fully agree with that proposition, as docbook comes with every tools
we need to produce manpages, html, xhtml, pdf, ps, even svg from unique
source format.

Is there something decided about that in GPD plans ?

 
2 - Grass French Documentation Project
----------------------------------------
As you know there is a french mailing list since 
Wed Feb 27 18:18:02 2002, initiated by Julien Bouffy from Nantes LUG
http://www.linux-nantes.fr.eu.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-fr
Some time later Julien set up a CVS server for the communuty at
2002/04/09 20:54:58 2002, and for now 4 people accessed to it (julien,
moritz, wurtz, mose). We store there our local projects (not much for
now, there is only the draft shape of Laporte & Balé document).

Voluntary people already share personnal documentation production, 
we have 2 projects for now:

- Training Report made by Olivier LAPORTE & Fernand Balé, named "Grass
5.0 sur Linux", a 54 pages .doc document, that have been poorly spitted
into html format.
visible at http://maps.makina-corpus.org/rapportgrass5 and we have 
a raw txt version at http://maps.makina-corpus.org/rapportgrass5/txt
=> we plan to translate it in docbook format for an easier publication
in common formats (ps, pdf, html, ..).
=> I have no idea if it would be useful to translate it in english for a
wider use. any comment ?

- Panels RoadMap gathered by Didier BETORED. 20 panels made with
illustrator with meticulous screenshots of each menu in the tk
interface, with links and legends. But be warned, files are huge (more
then 1Mo each). 
Avaible in draft pdf shape at http://neurd.net/grass/index.php
(Didier announced his work on more and more helpful documentation on the
list, but I remember we still have to ensure that we can spread all that
under an Open Content licence).
=> we want to make SVG version of those panels, to enable navigation
thru an SVG plugin (but acroread 5 also reads SVG files).


I crosspost to French Mailing list, to warn them that winter is over for
long, hey ho wake up people ! If you wish to join us and are able to
help even a little just contact me I'll explain you what is to be done.


For french-only readers
--------------------------
Ce qui précède est un mail sur la liste des développeurs de Grass, qui
fait un point sur l'organisation de l'effort de documentation et de
traduction de Grass en français.

Justement, s'il y avait un volontaire pour traduire tout ca, histoire de
lancer un thread sur la liste grass-fr, j'ai rien contre :)))


best regards,
mose

-- 
mose <mose at makina-corpus.org>               Makina Corpus   
http://libre.makina-corpus.org   http://makina-corpus.org