Advice needed - moving GNOME help files into langpacks

[Matthew East]

Hi Martin,

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Martin Pitt<martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> With normal gettext mo files we solved that problem by storing them in
> a separate directory (/usr/share/locale-langpack/), but doing the same
> is not that easy for GNOME help; I'm not quite sure whether adding an
> alternative search path to yelp and rarian is sufficient, or whether
> this would need adaptions to other packages as well. However, I have
> seen some hardcoded file references in e. g. the rarian source package:
>
>  ./data/beanstalk.document:DocPath[de]=/usr/share/gnome/help/beanstalk/de/beanstalk.xml
>
> which would definitively break due to that change. (The file isn't
> actually shipped, though).

I suspect that it should be possible to add an alternative search path
to yelp so that it checks in more than one location. If not, then it
should be and upstream should be responsive to making it happen within
this release cycle, I would have thought.

Likewise, it seems to me that such hardcoded file references might be
fixable bugs. For reference "beanstalk.xml" is an example which some
of the upstream developers use when planning features in the Gnome
help (see http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/quack/mallard.xml). I don't
think it's a real file at all. If that's the only hardcoded path, I
suspect that it's a red herring.

Incidentally, is the stripping also going to be done for other
packages using the directory /usr/share/gnome/help (such as
ubuntu-docs)? If so, am I right that we can go back to shipping all
languages in the ubuntu-docs package, rather than only those which are
>70% translated?

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF