[Scummvm-devel] Readme stable? + Readme GUI button

[Thierry Crozat]

On 13 July 2011 09:11, Eugene Sandulenko <sev at scummvm.org> wrote:
> On 12 July 2011 20:21, Simon Sawatzki <SimSaw at gmx.de> wrote:
>> I wondered if the Readme is stable as I consider translating a bigger part of it
> This is a good idea.
>
>> However, I read at some point in the past in the forums that a major rewrite of the Readme is planned or at least wished.
> Actually the rewrite already took place. We moved README on Wiki in a
> hope that more people will be working on it. Unfortunately that did
> not work well, so perhaps it is a good time for calling out for
> editors on our forums and website.

By that you mean the User Manual? Or is there a README page on the
wiki that I am not aware of?

I don't think the two are fully equivalent. Or do you think the README
could be replaced by a html/pdf dump of the User Manual (after some
needed updates) in the distribution packages?

> So probably it would be better to (a) update documentation on Wiki (b)
> translate that (c) write simple dumper of Wiki pages into plain HTML
> and extract that at release time.

There are mediawiki extensions to export to html/xml/pdf/... and I
started to look into that some times ago. There was not mich interest
in that so didn't follow up but I can update the info I have and
install the best extension I can find if needed.
Also there is already some mechanism in place to translate wiki pages,
and some pages have been translated to French and German.

If we decide what is in place is good, then we should probably let
existing GUI translators know that the README and wiki can be
translated (I can send an email for that) and also add a call for
contributors on the forum and a news item (I can also do that).
There is already a call for contributors for the User Manual I wrote a
year ago in the forum, but it would indeed be good to update that or
make a new one and also post a news item.

[...]
>> However, I got an idea that might avoid the problem of the Readme being wrongly displayed. A "Display README..." button could be inserted (next to the "About" button maybe) and the README could be displayed inside ScummVM in an extra window like the credits, but with no automatic scrolling. Instead there should be a scrolling bar to the right like in the debugger.

I don't think this is a good idea either. However maybe the README
should be displayed by the installer (and maybe it already is) on
platforms that have an installer. In such a case I guess it would be
possible to display the translated ReadMe in the installer as well
(e.g. let the user choose the language of the ReadMe).

I think it would also be good to modify the packaging scripts (and the
list of files to include in ScummVM packages on the wiki) to add the
translated ReadMe files in the packages for the various platforms. I
made the change locally for the MacOS X disk image (which is the only
platform I can test) and I can push that to the master repo. But I was
waiting until after 1.3.1 release to avoid confusion on which files
should be included in the 1.3.1 release packages.

Thierry

PS: I am quite busy until mid August in real life but hopefully after
that I will have more time to contribute to the project.