behind help.ubuntu.com

[Matthew East]

Hi Adi,

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Adi Roiban <adi at roiban.ro> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if there is any script or process that syncs the
> documentation from help.ubuntu.com with the content of ubuntu-docs
> package from Rosetta ?

No, there isn't. The problem is that importing translations from
Rosetta is quite a labour intensive process, and requires quite a lot
of manual intervention because quite a few of the translations will
contain some errors which tend to make the resulting xml documents
invalid. These need to be corrected manually.

However, that doesn't mean that what you are asking is impossible, see below.

> The Romanian LoCo team is working at a new help/support webpage and we
> would like to export the translations of ubuntu-docs from rosetta and
> make them available as webpages.

If you are just exporting one language, the number of errors will be
drastically reduced, or if you are lucky, there might not be any
errors at all. If you find any, you can always fix the po file with
the correct string and upload it to Rosetta again. That way, future
exports would not have the errors.

> Right now I can go on each template and request and export to be sent
> via email, but I would like to create a cron job that will update the
> translation every week.

I don't know whether it's possible to export po files from Rosetta
using a cron job. It is possible to get translations for all templates
in a particular package in one go, because that's what I do when
updating ubuntu-docs, but you'll need to speak to the Rosetta
developers to find out if you can script the export. If you can, then
it is likely that you can achieve what you are trying to do.

> Also I looked at wiki.ubuntu.com/Templates wiki page but it seems like
> the new help.ubuntu.com theme is not there.

It's not worth adding it - help.ubuntu.com is not run by a wiki
(unlike help.ubuntu.com/community) or any other dynamic software. It
contains static html files which are built from the xml documents
using scripts which you can find in the Makefile in the ubuntu-docs
package. The theme comes from the xsl and css files which you find in
the libs directory.

In our jaunty branch, a change has been made to the Makefile which was
contributed by a translator and which makes it possible to build
translated documents by switching one of the variables in the Makefile
and then running "make all".

Have a look at the Makefile in our jaunty branch here -
https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-doc/ubuntu-doc/ubuntu-jaunty.

The other reference which is likely to be useful to you is
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Translation.

Feel free to ask here if you have any more questions.

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