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Bug 23199 - Gentoo International Community
Summary: Gentoo International Community
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Websites
Classification: Unclassified
Component: [OLD] About Gentoo (show other bugs)
Hardware: All Linux
: High major (vote)
Assignee: Docs Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2003-06-20 15:28 UTC by FRLinux
Modified: 2007-06-28 08:58 UTC (History)
13 users (show)

See Also:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---


Attachments
ebuild 2.4.0 linked against libnjb-cvs (gnomad2-2.4.0.ebuild,586 bytes, text/plain)
2004-02-07 07:55 UTC, FRLinux
Details

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Description FRLinux 2003-06-20 15:28:21 UTC
Hello,

I am part of the French documentation team along with some other people who
believe that Gentoo Linux needs to be localised in order to provide it to a
wider audience. Following a discussion on IRC with latexer, i am now posting my
point of  view as a bug.

Before you draw any conclusions, hear me out for i have thought about this for a
while. I think that Gentoo Linux's website lacks of International support. I am
of course not referring to the Documentation part which is well maintained by
several coordinators all over Europe mostly but not exclusively.

My deception is pointing on the notion of comunity. I recall loads of requests
from countries about setting up a : <country>.gentoo.org website or at least
page to link out useful stuff and active projects in individual countries. This
has been denied every single time. I was told that Forums are actively fitting
in that role. I tend to disagree on the matter. 

I would like to see the possibility for other countries than the US to have an
active page on the *official website* to put links and informations about the
Gentoo comunity in their country. A bit like Debian i might say (don't throw me
stones, we're not through yet). The thing is it seems to be a problem for the
website maintainers. Agreed that you want exclusive control on the website (i am
not saying i fully accept it but i see your point here), by the way is that
because Gentoo Linux is a registered company that you want to control its brand
to ensure that the product doesn't go yo-yo ? 

I bought gentoofr.org a year ago (nobody forced me to do it, i know) because the
Gentoo Officials were denying a possibility to have a full Gentoo Community.
Between gentoofr.org (news site) and doc.gentoofr.org ; a second community
responsible for maintaining the French documentation all together and provide
wider information, that we cannot publish on the official site still because of
denial recurrence, we have a growing community of users willing to learn more
about  Gentoo Linux and experience its power. I am not forgetting IRC which
provides a very good start for beginners too.

So, now don't take me wrong, i love Gentoo and been using for more than a year
on several machines including servers. I would like to know which steps can be
taken (or not) to improve this whole international situation which i think is
getting a bit underestimated.

Sincerely Yours,
FRLinux.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Gentoo's website
2. See for yourself where the international links are
3. repeat step 1

Actual Results:  
Lack of international support on the official website.

Expected Results:  
More support.
Comment 1 Baptiste SIMON 2003-06-20 16:29:44 UTC
I would not be really contructive... but I want to let you know that I (frgentoo' project's coordinator, which website is http://doc.gentoofr.org/ as mentionned by FRLinux) agree totally this point of view. We've also tried to keep www.fr.gentoo.org when we've tried to found a DNS for our community's website. It seemed to be really difficult to have it.

Maybe your system is too rigid to for a community approach. Things may sometimes have to go through some principle to go higher.

I hope this time my english seemed less criticizing ;c)
Comment 2 Sergey Kuleshov (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-06-21 01:12:35 UTC
I sort of agree with what you say, and as member of Russian translation team have already made that proposal (just to other translators), but then we decided to postpone the discussion.

However, I would like to suggest a little different approach to the problem. Rather than just translating the gentoo.org webpages, which IMO do not contain to much useful information apart from documentation section, I propose for each community to maintain your own version of gentoo website, which would have it's own lang-spesific forum, all the transltaed docs, the news section and any other sections spesific to your country region.

In this way, I think we will be able to provide to our users as much useful info. as possible. Also this info. will be lang/region specific, when it is necesary and will not need to go through all aproval stages, required for the sections of gentoo.org

Russian team is already maintaining a site like this (www.gentoo.ru), which is actually in development phase and the only active part is forum at the moment.

P.S. Of course it will be great if gentoo would provide necessary hosting fasilities, as it will ease the job for many teams considerably. And of course the naming of such sites should ne uniform.
Comment 3 FRLinux 2003-06-21 06:29:46 UTC
I probably didn't make myself clear but i am for the same idea as yourself meaning a community page for each country represented where you can point people at interesting projects going on and showing that there is a community organised.

On a side note, the website should mention the GFDL explicitely concerning the documentation and translations, it has to be stated somewhere. I know the social contract states that all Gentoo stuff shall be released under GPL and related but GFDL should appear and be linked from the website.

Steph (aka FRLinux)
Comment 4 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-06-22 08:25:01 UTC
To be honest, I'd rather not see several independent but official Gentoo-sites. Ofcourse it's all right if there are hundreds of Gentoo-community sites, but only one should be the main site.

Translating the current site isn't all that difficult, but it's currently not supported yet (I think). But if the translators would be able to translate all the xsl-files into their language, and the main.xml/docs.xml/... files too in their appropriate language, one would already have a multinational site, with support for dozens of languages.

No, this doesn't give room for language-specific items, but it does give the Gentoo-site a more international look for Linux-users. Not so many distribution-specific sites are available in dozens of languages (there's one, I won't name it though :)
Comment 5 Baptiste SIMON 2003-06-22 08:38:40 UTC
I think that when we are speaking about "communities", we are speaking about the possibility for gentooists all over the world to have their own central place of "expression" (I mean something like gentoo.org, something really official and well presentated, not like the forums).

In fact, translating all the actual website is a solution for i18n, not for communities. And to add something, I don't think that many people would enjoy working for "gentoo inc." without the warranty of copyright and/or licenses if someone would tell them that all of the gentoo.org's doc is officially ONLY under the "gentoo inc."'s copyright (no explicit license).

So, to conclude, I would say that the idea of a community can not be resolved only by translating the website.

Regards,

-- 
Baptiste SIMON
   aka BeTa
Comment 6 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-06-22 08:51:10 UTC
But having independent sites means that there are seperate bodies who control it. And if one group of individuals isn't happy with how the community site works, they create a new one. Having everything centralized on one site is easier for maintenance and information control.

No, I don't think that gentoo.org should become a "community" site (as in everybody can post and such), but I do believe that seperate sites should be independent of Gentoo (i.e. non-official).

Comment 7 José Alberto Suárez López 2003-06-26 13:15:48 UTC
really i think that we must have a country.gento.org, but no a simply news transaltor, but with news posted for the comunity.
To do it i think that the best it's to use a postnuke like site for each country, with a common theme (but differents colors) and a nice logo :)

Why postnuke like? so its the easiest to involucrate the rest fo the community.

The problem? i was talking about this with seemant and klieber since months ago, but gentoo dont have the host facilities that it needs (hd, mysql, apache, php)

Comment 8 Baptiste SIMON 2003-06-26 13:54:55 UTC
I have just one no-trolling question in mind...
Why not giving the responsability of a www.[country].gentoo.org to some group of people (I mean a community, a project)...
Comment 9 Lars Weiler (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-06-26 16:46:46 UTC
So more responses from another country:  We Germans have our own community on www.gentoo.de.  There we coordinate the translations, plan a country-wide meeting (it has been already mentioned in the GWN) and informate about local projects.

I don't know if all users of this german community would be glad about a link from de.gentoo.org to this site, because - as you know - Gentoo Inc. is an american company with the aim of doing profit.  Maybe this opinion would change, when Gentoo Linux is really non-profit in future.
Comment 10 Alastair Tse (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-01 11:49:59 UTC
to be honest, i don't believe that basing the decision on whether gentoo is a for-profit/non-profit company is a good one. i thought the goal here was to start an effort of internationalisation of the gentoo community, and acknowledge that gentoo is more internationalised.

if you look at my page which lists all the known international gentoo user communities, you'll find that most have indeed actuall registered their own domain name. 

http://www.gentoo.org/~liquidx/#communities

(note: we probably should maintain this list on the official gentoo website)

i note that each community has their own way of presenting their webpage and may not find the gentoo default template attractive. what i suggest is, for those communities that do not wish to fall under the banner of gentoo.org, to maintain a very simple placeholder page as [countrycode].gentoo.org which describes their community and also links to their community page (for instance, www.gentoo.de).

then an offer should be made to those who are interested in maintaining a presence for their community on [countrycode].gentoo.org to use that space for more uses, like news, docs (i mean locale specific docs, like localising linux to their language, etc), mailing lists, etc.

what do others think of this arrangement?
Comment 11 FRLinux 2003-07-01 12:16:36 UTC
That sounds like a great plan, when can we organise this ?

I understand that the 'frontpage' of the country will be under Gentoo's design so we'll need to use a template i guess. Should i begin to do that ?

FRLinux
Comment 12 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-02 01:16:46 UTC
I'm in favor of liquidx' proposal. Especially because with this it is possible to have multiple community sites listed for one country (which will most likely occur as Gentoo becomes more and more popular). 
Comment 13 Lars Weiler (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-02 02:46:35 UTC
We have already two Community Websites here in Germany.  So I think a website de.gentoo.org can link to these two sites and further offer information about local meetings etc.

Seems that most of us are okay with this proposal of liquidx.  Now we should work on it! ;-)
Comment 14 Baptiste SIMON 2003-07-02 03:07:01 UTC
arf... you really want to control everything on gentoo.org !!!
But that's ok, "don't say you need more, else you would have nothing" used to say my mom ;c)

That's a great thing when we think to the current situation.
Comment 15 Alastair Tse (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-02 03:42:33 UTC
beta,

don't get me wrong. i'm all for internationalisation of the gentoo website. and as you say, translating all the pages on www.gentoo.org is not a solution. i agree with that and i don't think i even suggested that.

looking at gentoofr.org, it is hard to see how www.gentoo.org's format serve all the functions that gentoofr.org is going to provide. that is why i'm suggesting that we should go one step at a time.

so we first establish an international presence on ww.gentoo.org for the communities, and then we move on from there. btw, i'm a chinese/hongkong/australian living in britain, so you can't really say that i don't care about the international community.

with that said, i think the point you are trying to get at is you want to use fr.gentoo.org as the domain for the french gentoo documentation base. i think that should be better discussed on gentoo-dev. if you wish, contact me directly to raise your concerns and i'll try formulate a proposal for discussion on -dev.
Comment 16 Baptiste SIMON 2003-07-02 04:08:33 UTC
I really want to precise something :
That proposal is a good one ! no problem...

The reason of my last post's content is that we've tried many times since many months (at least 3 official times) to find a solution to make communities' websites interact w/ gentoo.org. But always we've got clearly negative answers.

But I repeat : Your solution is great ! That's a good thing.
Comment 17 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-02 04:18:19 UTC
Indeed, don't have fr.gentoo.org be a CNAME for www.gentoofr.org. What would you otherwise do if there are more French Gentoo Community sites? The proposal to have a page on fr.gentoo.org with (a) link(s) to the French Gentoo Community Site(s) with some additional information is a perfect solution.
Comment 18 FRLinux 2003-07-02 04:23:29 UTC
OK, now that we all agree on this, how and when can we implement this ?

Steph
Comment 19 Alastair Tse (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-02 04:36:28 UTC
i think Sven will probably give you a better eta. but i'll commit some time to writing up a GLEP proposal to push this along and collect all the thoughts about this already discussed in -dev.

Comment 20 Ken Nowack (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-07-22 19:05:04 UTC
I'll volunteer to help push this along. More inclusion is always a good thing. I'll even volunteer to do all the maintenance on the community sections once we have a method for updates in place.
Comment 21 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-08-04 11:32:37 UTC
I have made a proposal regarding the CVS structure and permissions that will hopefully help us in bringing the internationalization stuff working. Please read http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0010.html and comment on gentoo-dev@gentoo.org (or as comment here).

(PS the link will only work when the websites sync, can take up to 59 minutes).
Comment 22 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-08-04 11:39:34 UTC
BTW, that proposal is not only regarding CVS, it includes internationalization itself, but more in general.
Comment 23 Kurt Lieber (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-08-12 06:17:19 UTC
Some comments:

1) I have no idea where the notion arose that we will not support community/country specfic pages.  We are happy to support those, both officially by having 'www.fr.gentoo.org' as well as unofficially, by posting links on the web site to unofficial sites like 'www.gentoofr.org'  If you want to have an official site then yes, there are some stipulations and requirements that have to be met.  More info can be found here:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/11019/

2) We will not be officially supporting PostNuke and/or any other CMS variants in the near future.  We do not have the time, server resources or inclination to support these packages and ensure they are secured, patched, etc.  Right now, we support AxKit and XML, both of which have some extensive capabilities in and of themselves.  Users interested in starting an "official" *.gentoo.org site are invited to learn more about the capabilities of AxKit at axkit.org.  Users interested in using PostNuke or another CMS are invited to start an unofficial community which we will be happy to provide links to from the main gentoo.org site.

Basically, from an infrastructure standpoint, I'm happy to support both official and unofficial country and community web pages.  Anyone interested in starting one or the other should contact me for more information or to discuss options.

--kurt
Comment 24 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-08-28 09:28:19 UTC
Updated proposal committed.
Comment 25 FRLinux 2004-02-07 07:55:25 UTC
Created attachment 25131 [details]
ebuild 2.4.0 linked against libnjb-cvs
Comment 26 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-04-11 07:08:48 UTC
Sergey, are you still working on this? Or is Tobias more likely to be active on the project? Anyway, I would really appreciate if the GLEP is adjusted (for instance that http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.documentation/1141 becomes the official new GLEP), that a roadmap is available and that a policy is created that can be discussed.
Comment 27 FRLinux 2004-04-14 13:26:45 UTC
Nice one to see that finally something is moving in the international waters, took less than 8 months :p

Steph
Comment 28 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-07-02 04:37:11 UTC
I'm afraid this is going to continue idling until the GLEP is put out of commission due to inactivity (see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0028.html).

Could someone (or a complete translation team) put their shoulders under this and try writing up the requirements document in nice GuideXML? The requirements are already in the GLEP, we just need it formalised.

Once that's accomplished, we can ping the infrastructure folks for input (a testing account or similar) and see how the cvs structure can be migrated without issues (if infra agrees on the restructuring, that is).
Comment 29 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-08-07 04:29:31 UTC
I've asked grant to put this GLEP aside. We don't have the resources to put this one up completely. Some aspects of the GLEP can be integrated step by step (without a GLEP) so I'm sure the idea won't disappear.
Comment 30 nm (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2007-06-28 08:58:06 UTC
Reopening for proper closure.
Comment 31 nm (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2007-06-28 08:58:16 UTC
No need for LATER; this won't be fixed at all.