Comment 5 for bug 742857

Hi Gunnar,

Thanks for working on this!

We normally target the system help at non-technical end users. In general, these people only look at the help when they have a specific problem. Their aim, we assume, is to fix their problem as quickly as possible and get on with their work, so we don't like to make them read through a lot of text or learn lots of new concepts. These users typically won't understand the concept of environment variables, or even the terminal, so a topic on gettext would not be suitable for them without putting them through a lot of introductory material first (which we don't have). That's my argument for why the document you wrote wouldn't be suitable for direct inclusion in the system help.

It would, however, be very suitable for users who want to gain a better understanding of how the i18n infrastructure works (as you said). These people will tend to have more interest in learning concepts, and are likely to be more technically-adept. We normally recommend putting documents for these "technical" users on the Community Help Wiki at help.ubuntu.com.

More information on i18n (from a non-technical user's perspective) is needed in the system docs, however. The upstream GNOME desktop help is currently undergoing a massive overhaul, and I'm not sure we have enough suitable i18n material in there at the moment. Would you like to have a look at it and let me know what you think? You can see a recent build (work in progress) here : http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/unstable/

Thanks,

Phil