The required tools depends on the Operating System. Linux is recommended, although several members of the documentation team uses Windows. All members require the following to commit:
The basic process is to check out (~download) a file (or entire CVS module) using the CVS client, edit the file, configure and validate the file, review the diff/patch, and finally commit (~upload) the file to the server. Building and viewing the file locally before commit is also an option.
Note that the different translation projects use different encodings, so to work with these the text editor must support these encodings. Although the English documentation often uses ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), it also uses UTF-8 so the text editor should understand UTF-8. Most do.
Testing modifications takes a little time to get used to but after awhile it becomes natural. See the configuration and validation chapter for more information.
CVS: By default, most Linux and Mac installations include the CVS command-line tools.
PHP: Several operating systems include PHP by default, but the following extensions are required: libxml, xmlreader, and DOM. These are enabled by default since PHP 5.1.0.
PhD: See the PhD section for details. This is what builds the manual.
PATH: The system terminal uses the PATH environment variable to find shell commands, such as cvs and php. Consider adding the appropriate paths.