Bugzilla Bug 23199

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.

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)

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.

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)

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 :)

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

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).

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)

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)...

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.

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?

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

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). 

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! ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

OK, now that we all agree on this, how and when can we implement this ?

Steph

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.

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.

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).

BTW, that proposal is not only regarding CVS, it includes internationalization
itself, but more in general.

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

Updated proposal committed.

Created an attachment (id=25131) [details]
ebuild 2.4.0 linked against libnjb-cvs

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.

Nice one to see that finally something is moving in the international waters,
took less than 8 months :p

Steph

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).

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.

Reopening for proper closure.

No need for LATER; this won't be fixed at all.