Nagios documentation in docbook

[Olivier Jan]

Hi list,

First of all, i'ld like to wish a happy new year to all nagios users on 
the mailing list. Now, that's done, i 'ld like to introduce the first 
docbook version of the official nagios version 3.x documentation. This 
version is certainly beta quality but i wanted to share it with the 
community to see if there's any interest about such a work.
This release is a milestone for us in our way to have the nagios 
documentation translated in french. Why did we made a docbook version 
before translating and not directly translating the html version is what 
i gonna explain now. The reason of this post is to showcase our 
translation workflow and see if it can inspirate other translation teams.

Imagine english documentation maintained in docbook format, commited in 
a git or subversion repository to track changes. First, it's easy for a 
translation project to see what's changed in the original version when 
Ethan upgrades it. Those changes can be easily tracked and committed to 
the translation repository (french for us). At that point, we use po4a 
to generate .po files from the docbook source and give those .po files 
to the translators. They don't have to write docbook tags and they don't 
mess with the code. Just plain old gettext .po files to translate with 
poedit, lokalize for example. At the end, we generate back the 
translated version in docbook format with po4a. The docbook tags are 
untouched, only the translated strings. This way, docbook structure can  
evolve independently from the translated content. We have well tested 
this workflow and it seems to just work fine for us.

Feel free to give us feedback about that "experimentation" directly on 
http://trac.nagios-fr.org/projects/docnagios3 where you can also 
download the docbook edition in pdf format 
(http://trac.nagios-fr.org/projects/docnagios3/raw-attachment/wiki/WikiStart/nagios.pdf) 
or to share your thoughts on the list.
Does this workflow interest another translation team ? What's about 
Ethan's interest to maintain the original version in docbook ? These are 
the sort of questions we are now facing in the french translation team. 
Please help us find answers.


Olivier Jan
French Nagios Community
http://www.nagios-fr.org


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