what if you had a documentation team to whom diffs were
distributed so that changes could be kept up-to-date?

The initial translations will be a -ton- of work, but then
changing a few paragraphs shouldn't be that difficult to
keep up with. =20


-----Original Message-----
From:	Peter Seebach [mailto:seebs@plethora.net]
Sent:	Tue 10/29/2002 1:48 AM
To:	current-users@netbsd.org
Cc:=09
Subject:	Re: Translated manual pages=20
In message <20021029041453.GA9898@rek.tjls.com>, Thor Lancelot Simon =
writes:
>What _harm_ could localized manual pages possibly do?  Japanese users =
and=20
>developers have made tremendous contributions to NetBSD, to BSD, to =
Unix,
>and, indeed, to computing.  If someone wants to start contributing =
localized
>manual pages -- particularly Japanese manual pages -- I think it cannot
>possibly be but for the best.

What harm?  A massively increased chance for bitrot.  Imagine, if you
will, that someone who *doesn't* speak Japanese makes a change to =
something
which needs to be documented.  What's this person supposed to do about
the localized man page?  Let it be flat out wrong?  Learn a new language
to update it?  Does he have some way to force updates in the foreign =
language
version?

Wrong documentation can be worse than no documentation.

I'm not actually making an argument for or against localized man pages
here - I'm just answering the quesiton "what harm...".

-s