Software Center documentation

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Mar 5, 2010, at 8:17 AM, Matthew East wrote:
> ...
> 2010/3/4 David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com>:
>>
>> Currently Software Center ships its own documentation, and after a
>> discussion in the Ubuntu Translations Coordinators team [1] we agreed
>> that it would be best for documentation and translations to be 
>> included in ubuntu-docs.

Help me understand the reasons given in that discussion:

>       * Translations would be more visible to translators, as they'd be
>         in the Ubuntu templates list at translations.lp.net/ubuntu

Why wouldn't the software-center templates be in the templates list at 
translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu? Does this mean the rest of 
software-center is currently untranslatable? If so, how should we fix 
that?

>       * They'd be shipped as part of ubuntu-docs, and integrated in the
>         package's workflow (i.e. translations would be built before
>         NonLanguagePackDeadline)

Why wouldn't translations for software-center help pages be built at 
the same time as translations for the rest of software-center?

>       * This will make it possible to ship only the translations in the
>         user's locale (as opposed to all translations). Now ubuntu-docs
>         are part of language packs.

Is ubuntu-docs the only package covered by language packs? If any other 
packages are covered, how does that work?

>       * It would be consistent with what other Ubuntu applications do
>         at the moment with documentation (e.g. usb-creator)

Does that mean if you uninstall usb-creator, help pages remain on your 
computer discussing it as if it's still there?

> I agree that from a translations and documentation team point of view,
> this would be better, for the reasons which you have listed.
>
> However, I proposed this last September and one of the objections was
> that the help file is licensed under the GPL. If that can change, then
> I think this would be a good idea. Here is a link to the discussion.
>
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2009-September/013655.html

As I said in that discussion, the reason for the GPL is that "it is 
quite likely in future versions that some of the help will be embedded 
in the code, and vice versa". I hope the same becomes true for the help 
in every Ubuntu application, because that seems like the primary way to 
get people to read it.

> There is one other point which I would raise though: as I understand
> it, Software Center is something of an upstream project, because it is
> used in distributions like Debian. If that's the case, then there is a
> clear argument for having help as part of the application which can be
> used by Debian.

Yes, here it is in Debian:
https://launchpad.net/debian/+source/software-center

> Obviously the absence of translations for this help file is extremely
> unfortunate. And if the decision is taken to keep it in the upstream
> product, I would say that some serious effort should be put into
> making it translatable in the same way as the application's interface
> is.
> ...

What else do we need to do to make it translatable?

Thanks
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/