NLS Policy

This document outlines the policy Xaraya is going to take with regard to
the international communities that surround the project.

Those communities are an important part of the project and as such we
would like to draw them in closer to the central development team rather
than distance them from us. Hopefully this will lead to a good flow of
information and prompt translations so all communities stay up to date.

For the purposes of this doc, NLS refers to the National Language
Support - the translations and the community that goes with them -
commonly referred to as I18N in the open source world.

NLS Teams
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Each language would have a team leader and then a small team around
that leader.
The leader would be admin on the appropriate NLS website, have commit
access to the langs repos and be moderator on the appropriate mailing
list.
The leader (or leaders) will also be the person to liaise with the centra=
l
team on issues of importance to the NLS Team. On the central team side th=
ere
will ideally be one or more members who can act as godfathers to the NLS
Team and make sure their voice is heard - for now myself and marcinmilan
seem to have inherited that role.

One NLS team could be producing several translations. For example the
French team would be responsible for producing all the French language
locales - e.g. French French, Canadian French, African French, etc...
(this is of course on the assumption there is someone on that team=20
who is qualified to produce the extra locales, if not then they arent=20
produced)

NLS Websites
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All NLS websites will be subdomains of xaraya.com
They will share users tables with xaraya.com itself so one login will
work for all sites (not entirely sure how to do this - setting up an
LDAP server would be one way).
Until I can get this sorted each site will have its own users table.

They could take some feeds as RSS off xaraya.com if needed or just
translate the articles one by one and add them to their own articles
tables.
The site would have its own admins and editors - though several of the
Xaraya core team would be admins to all xaraya.com domains as well as a
backup.

This will avoid the PN fiasco of NLS sites having random names and
being scattered all over the net.
We own several international domains, such as xaraya.de. These will be
setup as redirects to de.xaraya.com. But the only publicised domains will
be the *.xaraya.com ones. Since we dont own all the international domains
this will hopefully stop people going to those sites that we dont own and
assuming its an official site.

All the websites will use the same theme (and will be the only sites to d=
o
so since that theme isnt being distributed) - this will help create the
unified, official look to all the xaraya.com sites.

NLS Translation Files
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The output of the translation process is one or more locale files.
These files should go together in a seperate directory named after the
locale itself and go in a seperate repository (xaraya-langs) on xaraya.co=
m.
At least the team leader of each translation team would then be given
access to commit to that repository. They would not get access to push
to any other repos unless they already had that access through being on
the dev team.

This means that we have all the translations and the NLS communities
all accessible from the one domain and all through the single frontend
(xaraya.com).
This coupled with the NLS mailinglists/newsgroups means we can keep the
NLS international communities closer to the centre of Xaraya rather
than abandoning them all over the web.


I hope this answers a few questions.
The domains are setup already - they just all point to xaraya.com at the
moment. They will stay that way until the relavent team leader comes
forward and requests a website, at which point I will set one up.

We currently have 12 NLS lists - I need to know the team leader for each
one. I have a fair idea who it currently is for most of them, but if in a=
ny doubt
feel free to have a mini election amongst yourselves and then just let me
know the result.

Cheers,

miko & marcinmilan on behalf of Team Xaraya