Hi everybody,
As some of you might know already, we've been working very hard over
2015 on some new tools and instructions to make it easier for newcomers
to get started with Tails. As part of this we've been rewriting
completely the instructions to download, verify, install, and start
Tails. We called this the Installation Assistant. You can see what it
looks like already here (but please don't advertise this link apart for
testing):
https://tails.boum.org/install/
The big improvement of this assistant is that people will be presented
with a linear set of instructions leading them from downloading to
configuring the persistent storage, depending on their base OS and a few
other things.
So the bad news for you is that all the amazing work that you did in the
past on the equivalent of these instructions is going to be lost. I'm
very sorry about this. If that can comfort you, the work that I did on
writing them as well :)
But the good news is that it should make it easier for many more people
to successfully follow your translations. And also, that the overall
quantity of words is slightly less. I estimated the new instructions to
3630 while the old ones were 5324 words. That's 30% less (but I admit
it's an optimistic figure).
This is in great part due to the fact that we factorized things a lot.
For example, people installing from Windows and from Debian are going
through the same download and verification instructions.
So there two side effects that are worth noticing for you:
1. We rely heavily on [[!inline directives. These are prone to break in
ikiwiki without us really knowing why (see #6907). I'm not really happy
about that but I don't know how we could have done this work without
them. So let's see how things go...
2. We use dirty CSS tricks to display some strings of a document in some
scenarios and some other strings of the same document in other
scenarios. For example, if you are on the Mac DVD scenarios you will see
« Restart on the Tails DVD » while if you are on the Mac USB scenario
you will see « Restart on the temporary Tails ».
I'm sorry the corresponding code is a bit dirty and I'm worried about
how this will play with different sentence structures in different
languages. But the mechanism should be flexible enough.
So I'm very interested in having feedback from you in case you're
blocked by some piece of code that you can't translate. Also make sure
to build the website locally and check if all the scenarios are fine
once you translated a string. Also tell me if I should write
documentation for translators for this or add comments in the code, etc.
Regarding the release schedule for that. We are planning to release a
beta version of this assistant in December.
Then we are planning to release a final version of this assistant in
January. By then the current "Download Tails" button will be replaced by
an "Install Tails" button.
So feel free to start translating this right now (strings might change a
bit until the beta), between the beta and the final release (only a few
strings will change) or after the final release as you prefer.
