kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Marco Ciampa <ciampix@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 02:09:08PM -0500, Jon Evans wrote:
> I think the "typical" Linux user wants up-to-date documentation and has
> Internet access.  The kind who does not have Internet access, or cares a
> lot about how the documentation is packaged, is not the "mass market" Linux
> user.  KiCad is not some software targeted at some narrow segment of Linux
> users: probably most of our users are on Windows.

Ok, following your reasoning let's drop support for MacOS and Linux and
focus only on Windows since most of the users are there... see? There is
something you are missing here...

[...]

> I believe part of the reason we have trouble getting people to help write
> the documentation is because the build process is tricky (it is only easy
> on Linux; I've spent some time trying to make it run on Windows and Mac but
> given up as a waste of time).  We have a lot of active and engaged users on
> Windows and Mac who basically cannot contribute to the documentation
> because they can't easily build and test it locally.

Ok let's improve this instead! And since the strings are .po files. Why
not use an online service to support translations like transifex,
weblate, zanata, pootle, crowdin, etc. with an online CI integration
support it should be much less difficult...

> One thing we could do that would help this is to change the build process
> so that the main build is only HTML, and PDF build is an optional extra
> generated from the HTML (that can be enabled by a CI job for packaging).

That would be a HUGE mistake. PDF made from HTML are just horrible and
unusable. The same for epub (that I use and love).

> Another thing would be to change the translation system from the existing
> gettext/po system (which is not very well suited to long-form text) to a
> manual translation system.

Are you serious? That would even a bigger mistake!

That would make the translation process completely unmanageable... just
imagine to have to read and compare manually hundred of pages to see what
changed in the original... impossible!

--

Saluton,
Marco Ciampa