[Windows7sins-translators] GNUN support for windows7sins.org

[Yavor Doganov]

Matt Lee asked me to subscribe to windows7sins-translators to see
if/how we can implement gettextized translations via GNUN.

The site layout is a complete mystery to me (for now), so I'd really
like to know more about that.

GNUN has many severe limitations (summarized below), but as this
campaign is important, I'm willing to add workarounds in order to
support windows7sins.  This means more klugde, but at the end it may
pay off -- we already know we have to basically rewrite the package in
order to support other sites, and it would be nice to learn some
lessons first.

1) GNUN supports only CVS, because gnu.org (the www project at
   Savannah) is CVS.  I've removed this limitation 2 days ago in CVS
   trunk, so next release will support Subversion as well.

2) GNUN supports only XHTML, because HTML 4 was considered obsolete
   at the time the new gnu.org design was made.  It is not
   particularly hard to perform HTML 4 validation too, with a few
   caveats: detecting every article will slow the build tremendously,
   so we have to assume that a site has ALL articles either in XHTML
   or HTML.

3) All of GNUN's rules are extremely dependent on the gnu.org layout
   -- e.g. it expects the makefiles to be under /server/gnun, the
   server templates under /server, and the validation tool
   automaticlally expands the templates to construct a valid page at
   build time.

4) The file names of the translatable articles must be with .html
   extension, with the exception of the server templates, which must
   be with .include extension.  This is something very tricky to
   solve, currently.

5) The helper script `make-prototype' expects to find translation
   links and a $Date CVS keyword, surrounded by exactly the same HTML
   markup as in gnu.org's server/standards/boilerplate.html.  This is
   going to be a pain.

6) As per 4), all translations are generated in the form
   `foo.LANG.html' or `foo.LANG.include', the originals being
   `foo.html' and `foo.include'.  This does not play well with
   multiviews, where the original must be named `foo.en.html'.  I see
   that the site redirects to en.windows7sins.org, so maybe this
   problem is irrelevant?

7) There are surely many more limitations I can't enumarate right now.


Nevertheless, I think that with a few advices, some work and testing,
we can support windows7sins.org.  To begin with, (Matt?), could you
please answer these questions:

1) Is there a SVN repository (anonymous access for the time being is
   OK)?
2) I see meta.windows7sins.org -- are translations committed there and
   automatically pushed to the master site?
3) How are the pages constructed?  I.e. what is the sequence of the
   #include directives, e.g.

       foo.inc
       bar.inc
       baz.inc
       mumble.html
       mumble-more.html
       zardoz.inc

   We need to know the exact relationship in order to decide what to
   validate and what not, and how.