[mapserver-dev] Docs and Releases...

[Lars Lingner]

Daniel Morissette schrieb:
> Lars Lingner wrote:
>>
[...]
>>
>> What do you think? Would the list approach be a way to go? Are there any
>> other ideas?
>>
> 
> My first reaction as an outsider to the documentation setup is that
> duplication of identical documents is a bad thing and should be avoided
> if possible. I'm thinking mostly about the side-effect of duplication on
> search engine results... but I don't know the setup well enough to
> suggest an alternative.
> 

Let me explain by an example...

the setup is like this:

in ...trunk we have (its just an extract)
\en
\en\mapfile\index.txt
\en\development\rfc
\en\download.txt
\de
\de\mapfile\index.txt
\de\development\rfc
\de\download.txt
\_static
\_templates
conf.py
Makefile


So each <lang> directory starts as copy of "en". This doubles the files
for 1 translation ("en" + "de") anyways. Some of the files shouldn't get
translated (for whatever reasons).
Now comes the makefile and copies the special files to the other <lang>
directories to prevent changes.

(Translators should be instructed which files should stay untranslated)

This way, the MapServer devs can continue to maintain the RFCs, the
download page and other pages at one place. You should not care about
which download page you should update, there is (as a result of copying)
just one version - the English one.

The reason for duplicating the files for all translations is, that the
links between the languages are based on the same file name. Just the
language part of the url is changed.

The results are URLs like this:
http://www.mapserver.org/trunk/en/download.html
http://www.mapserver.org/trunk/de/download.html

As the files download.html are identical, there is indeed no reason to
to put it twice (ore more) on the server. But I cant think of an
solution where this isn't necessary with the way Sphinx works today.

I know this way looks a bit hacky, but:
- mapserver.org gets translations (at least motivates translators :)
- devs don't need to worry about translations with each release
- the setup can be handled by an makefile, like the current setup

Regarding search engines: I can't say anything, I simply don't know how
this setup would effect the search result. Maybe someone else has an
opinion here.


Lars