gnucash-docs

[Chris Lyttle]

On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 22:31, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 09:21:13PM -0800, Chris Lyttle was heard to remark:
> > 
> Seems to me that there is still room in the world for a manual,
> which does have an overview of principles, and talks about things 
> more broadly/generally, and is not task-oriented, but more
> concept-oriented.  More of an accounting-principles type style.
> 
> I am no longer clear on how this overlaps with carol's stuff.  
> I thought her stuff was part concepts, part tasks.
> 
> Either way, is there any left-over material that *could* be mangled 
> into a manual? (in  theory, by someone, without having to write
> much new text?)
> 
> I still want a 'manual' that can be posted on-line at least.
> and it would be nice to have the manual also be accessible
> from gnucash directly, in addition to the help.
> 

Yes, you can see an online version of what I did with Carol's material
at the following URL.

http://home.mminternet.com/~chrislyt/links.html

My intention from here thru 1.8 releases was to turn the docs there into
what you're describing. Basically my idea was to use the material and
turn it into a tutorial that also discusses accounting principles and
concepts.
> 
> > Now we have a choice moving forward, to cut the translated docs so that
> > perhaps someone using GnuCash will be encouraged to write new ones or
> > translate my new help to their language or to include the old docs in
> > the hope that someone will see the english docs are better and proceed
> > to translate. 
> 
> I kind prefer the latter. 
> 
> For example: message catalogs: gnucash-1.4 had more translations than
> 1.6 ever did (or 1.7 does, to this day).  Some of the translations that
> were cut never came back.  (ukrainian is one that comes to mind).
> 
> > Either way its going to be a lot of work for whoever does
> > the translation. 
> 
> Yes, we know that, but the naive translators do not.  They think "well,
> someone has started this, and all I need to do is fix it up a bit".  Its
> a lot easier to take that approach than to think "gulp. Doing a
> translation means starting at square 1 for a very big job". 
> 
> Its more of a psychological thing: the translator feels more comfortable
> because someones already started the job.  Laid the foundation.   Its
> like any community-service thing: easier to pitch in to some existing
> scheme, than to champion a brand new one.  Even if, after a while, 
> you realize that you are doing most of the work.
> 

OK. I can go with that, I'll also work on moving the old docs from the
main gnucash module into the new docs module. Perhaps you could just
manually move the directories to preserve the history? (Just an idea, if
its to hard/to much trouble dont worry about it I'll just make a copy
and remove when I'm done). Your point about the message catalogs is a
salient one, I've not been around for long enough to know this is the
case.
> 
> virtually everybody will be too lazy to do that.  New releases get
> anywhere from 10K to 30K downloads (actually, I think even more for 
> the more recent ones), and that's not counting whatever ships on
> redhat/suse/connectiva cdroms, etc.    Not only will individuals
> not make the copy, but I also fear that the package maintainers who work
> at redhat/suse/connectiva (and debian) will not bother to assemble 
> a suitable euro version.  And so the gazillion-whatever european
> gnucash users will have no native-lang documnetation , as opposed
> to old, crappy documentation.  I say "something is better than nothing,"
> in this case.
> 
> 

Wow really? 30K of individual downloads? I thought the 1K of downloads
from sourceforge wasn't as much as from gnucash.org but I didnt realize
the number was so much more. That is a good thing to know, encourages me
more to work harder and do a better job.

Chris
-- 
RedHat Certified Engineer #807302549405490.
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