Software Store Help

[Matthew East]

Hi Kyle,

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Kyle Nitzsche
<kyle.nitzsche at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There are other downstream releases of Ubuntu (for example the Canonical OEM
> group's UNR releases) that sometimes do not display the Ubuntu Help Center
> at the client's request because the content *as a whole* is an imperfect fit
> for the slightly modified systems. This is a loss because most of the help
> is relevant, and this help probably is be too.

Is it too simplistic to suggest that you could just branch ubuntu-docs
and customise it in the small ways necessary to fit the modified
systems?

> In the mean time, I propose this app's help content should be kept separate
> and should be launched from within the package, to ensure it is actually
> present on all systems.

This also affects the help for usb-creator (nearly ready) and
ubuntuone-client (not begun but on our task list), so it's an
important issue to resolve, I think.

The problem is that *right now* we have no means to handle
translations for such separate packages. We don't have automatic
translated help exports from Launchpad translations, and we don't have
automatic xml error correction in Launchpad translations. We're not
going to have it by Karmic either. So I'm pretty confident that if we
don't put help for these applications in ubuntu-docs, it won't be
translated into the 50 odd languages which ubuntu-docs is translated
into. It will follow the sorry situation of the gnome-app-install
help, and be translated into 1 or at most a few languages. We simply
don't have the resources to maintain manually exported translations
over a number of packages at this time.

I'm ready to be proved wrong, and would be pleased to be proved wrong,
but unless you have another solution I simply can't see how we can
ensure that translations are going to be achieved for these documents.
And given that translations is one element of the fundamental Ubuntu
promises, it's of primary importance. If I had to choose between a
properly translated ubuntu-docs package, and trying to make life
easier for a downstream distribution, I'd choose the former. If a
downstream product is going to fork from Ubuntu proper, it's only
normal to expect that some work to be done to update the documentation
for that project, and forking ubuntu-docs is not a particularly
difficult task. These particular documents we are talking about would
of course be left untouched.

Honestly, if I could see a way to get everything right, I would do it
like a shot, but I'm struggling at the moment. I'm very open to other
ideas though.

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