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1.1 Why GNUN Is Being Developed

The GNU Project’s website, has become considerably large over the years. Maintaining it requires significant effort, and sometimes a new web standard is developed faster than the time required to migrate all articles to the next widely adopted one.

When it comes to internationalization, the problems are so many that it is hard to enumerate them. It has become apparent that maintaining translations up-to-date is a major undertaking, involving tedious skimming through commit logs, reviewing diffs and other medieval techniques to catch up. Some translation teams have developed their own sets of scripts, but so far there has been no universal solution.

This unpleasant situation, combined with rapid and incompatible design changes, have led some teams to neglect the important work of keeping their translations in line with the changing original articles. As a consequence, the GNU Project is facing the problem of maintaining them in suboptimal ways, in order to keep the information updated.

The reasons for developing GNUnited Nations are very similar to those that led to the inception of GNU gettext, or GNOME Documentation Utilities (gnome-doc-utils) some years later.