Wine's Documentation in French

[Francois Gouget]

The Wine documentation has been translated to French by students from 
the Insa of Rouen.

The credits for the translation go to:

     * Wine User Guide
       Romain CONSEIL
       Damien GIRAUDEAU
       Guillaume LEFEBVRE
       Yvon BENOIST (proofreading)
       http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/wine-user.html

     * Wine FAQ
       Romuald VIEUX
       Yvon BENOIST (proofreading)
       http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/wine-faq.html

     * WineLib User Guide
       José CARRENO
       Yvon BENOIST (proofreading)
       http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/winelib-user.html

And believe me, this is a lot of work so they really deserve our kudos. 
You probably noticed that the Wine Developer's Guide was not translated 
but that makes sense: if you want to work on Wine it's really best if 
you speak English anyway.

So what's needed now is to integrate the translation with Wine. This is 
what I have done by converting the translation to .po format to make it 
easier to maintain and tweaking the Makefiles accordingly.

The patch is pretty big (even compressed it's more than 200KB) so I did 
not attach it to this email. Instead I have set up a page on my web site 
and you can the patch using this URL:

http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/docfr.diff.gz

Here is what the patch does:
    Add a Makedoc.rules.in file which handles the conversion of SGML 
files to the final documentation format.
    Modify documentation/Makefile.in to use Makedoc.rules.in.
    Add documentation/fr with the po files of the French translation.
    Use po4a to generate a translated Sgml file from the original sgml 
documentation and then let Makedoc.rules.in generate the documentation.
    Detect po4a in configure.ac.

The translation appears to have been made from a snapshot of the 
documentation taken in the summer of 2004. Now, a bit more than 6 months 
later, the translation is still more than 90% complete. IMHO this proves 
that maintaining the translation is quite feasible. If you see any bits 
of English in the documents above, this is precisely because the 
translation is not 100% complete anymore: in that case po4a-translate 
keeps the original version rather than use the outdated translation.

For more information about po4a:
http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/

I will upload anything new to the following page:
http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/docfr.shtml

Now you pretty much know everything. Let me know if you have concerns, 
suggestions, etc. I'm hoping we can get this in place soon.

-- 
Francois Gouget
fgouget at codeweavers.com