This page offers some basic information for people who would like to help with the Installation Guide, either by writing/editing the original English version or by translating the manual.
Help with the content of the manual is very, very welcome. It is very important to keep in mind that the manual documents the installation process for all architectures (and subarchitectures) supported by Debian. You can either take a general perspective or work on concrete installation instructions for a specific architecture. If you want to start working on the manual, please send an email to the Debian Installer mailing list.
If there is an existing translation for your language, please contact the current translators and offer to help. They can often be contacted through the l10n mailing list for your language (if one exists). If you want to start a new translation, please send an email to the Debian Installer mailing list.
There are currently two methods used for translating the manual:
The second method is often preferred by translators if they are already used to translating using PO files. Advantages are that you are confronted less with the XML tags and it is easier to see which parts are not yet translated and where the original text has changed. The main disadvantage is that you lose sight of the context of text to some degree.
Information on checking out the manual from the Debian Installer repository and
general information on translating the manual can be found in the
translations.txt file. For translation using PO files, you should also read the
translations_po.txt file. There is also a
README
file that explains how to build the manual from XML files and the packages required for building.
(These files will be integrated in the future.)
Active translators are expected to be subscribed to
Two options translators should be aware of are including optional paragraphs in your translation and translating or localizing entities.
It is possible to use RSS to track changes to the manual.
If you translate XML files, use:
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/d-i/trunk/manual/en/?op=rss&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1
If you translate PO files, use:
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/d-i/trunk/manual/po/<lang>/?op=rss&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1