Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 7 Jun 2001 14:01:53 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: Configure.help i18n system |
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[ Kernel mailing list added to Cc ]
On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Keitaro Yosimura wrote: > > Configure.help i18n system is the thing which uses MD5 SUM of the text > of the text as a key, and calls suitable data to the present language > setup (it judges from an environment variable).
Quite frankly, I dislike the current Configure.help setup for a lot of reasons, none of which are i18n-related.
One is a "simple" technical detail (the fact that it is all in one big file instead of distributed over the places that actually _implement_ the different config options), but the other is just that from what I've seen, the overlap between people developing the code, and the people trying to explain the config options is actually rather small.
So I wonder if the Configure.help text should not possibly be even _more_ distributed than just splitting it up into different files. It might very well be acceptable to actually distribute it over the net (and have just a mapping of config options into www-addresses or something).
I suspect that this is actually something that intersects with the i18n work: how does the i18n projects distribute the actual help texts? Done right, maybe the same distributed environment could be used for everything, and getting Configure.help entirely out of the "core kernel" tree, and into a separate distribution (where the English version would be just one among many distributions).
I like to keep things that belong together in one distribution (especially so that when people make changes to infrastructure they can more easily change all the users - there's been tons of synchronization problems with "external packages"), but on the other hand some things would probably be better maintained outside the core package.
Configure.help certainly isn't all that kernel version dependent, and could successfully be maintained completely outside the kernel, I suspect.
And I know that I'm bad at maintaining documentation like this, simply because I never use it, and I don't care enough. Trying to care about the i18n version when I don't even understand what it says would be completely impossible for me.
Comments?
Linus
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