Skip to content
Snippets Groups Projects

Writers

Last edited by Alexandre Julliard

Writing Tasks for Wine

In the long run, documentation and coordinating development can be just as important to a software project as coding. Even if you don't feel comfortable programming, there are still many places where Wine could use your help. Language skills are the primary need for maintaining the wiki, translating different portions of the project, and writing good documentation. Understanding the actual code that makes up Wine should only be necessary if you want to help make documentation for developers.

Writing Documentation

README and Manpages

Documentation included in Wine's source code includes the README file (included in the top level of the Wine git tree), translations of the README in the documentation/ directory of the Wine source tree, and various manpages, which can be found in the same folder as the component they document (most can be found in the tools/ directory, but the manpage for wine itself is located in loader/).

Wiki

Much of Wine's documentation for both users and developers has been ported to this wiki, including the various guides. Keeping the wiki up-to-date by clearing out abandoned and out-dated content, or resolving contradictory statements, gives the wiki a much higher signal-to-noise ratio and makes it easier for both developers and users to find what they're looking for. Editing the wiki just requires writing in Markdown syntax. Follow the instructions below to request edit access to the wiki.

Getting access to the Wiki

To edit Wiki pages, you will need to request Developer access to the corresponding project on Gitlab.

To do this, first create an account. You'll need to validate your email address.

Note: Wine uses a real name policy on committed changes, and this also applies for Wiki changes. Please use your real name when creating your Gitlab account. Accounts using an alias will not be approved.

You can then request Developer access here.

Editing the Wiki

Once you have edit access, you can modify Wiki pages or create new ones. Please see the Gitlab documentation for more information about Gitlab Wikis.

Translating

Translating Wine and its documentation are a high priority. See Translating for more information on translating Wine's dialogs and internal resources. In addition, translations are needed for documentation on the website, including this wiki.

Translating Static Web Content

Translating static web content requires some comfort with the terminal.

The procedure for updating the website (eg adding a translation) is to first create a fork of the git repo of the website:

git clone https://gitlab.winehq.org/winehq/winehq.git

Translate individual pages located in templates/en and place them in templates/xx (where xx is the language code). After that, make a series of git commits (one per page is probably good), push it to your fork, and submit a merge request.

For help with git, see the Git Wine Tutorial

Translating the Wiki

To translate a Wiki page to a new language, you need to work from a git clone of the Wiki repository. The command to do this is:

git clone git@gitlab.winehq.org:wine/wine.wiki.git

See the Gitlab documentation for more details about cloning the repository.

Once you have a local clone, you should make a copy of the English version of the page you want to translate, into the appropriate subdirectory for your language. For instance, to translate the Download page to Japanese, you would do

cp Download.md ja/Download.md

It is important to keep the exact same file name as the English version. You can create the directory for your language if it doesn't exist yet.

You should then run the update-translations tool in the top directory to update the Translations link at the top of all the translations of that page:

./update-translations Download.md

This will add a link like :flag_jp: 日本語 at the top of all the other translations, and it will add links to the other translations at the top of your newly created file. You should then commit all the changed files, and your new file, and push the changes:

git add Download.md */Download.md
git commit -a -m "Adding Japanese translation of Download page"
git push origin

You can now work on translating your new Japanese page.

Adding a new language

If you are translating the Wiki to a completely new language that isn't supported yet, you'll need to add the language to the various variables at the top of the update-translations script itself. Hopefully the existing contents are self-explanatory.

Don't forget to commit your modified update-translations script along with your new pages.

See Also