[Perkamon-devel] Linux man pages translation to Spanish

[D. Barbier]

On 2011/8/1 Francisco Javier Cuadrado:
> Hi.
>
> I'm an active member of the debian l10n Spanish team and I would like
> to translate linux man pages to Spanish.
>
> Some time ago I tried to talk to Dennis (who is CC'ed) about it,
> because I want to use perkamon infrastructure, but Dennis was away and
> we can't talk anything. So now I'm trying to contact directly perkamon
> project, hoping that someone can hear me and help me.

Hello,

I am really sorry for the delay, there has been no upstream release
for months, and I became too lazy :(

> I see what you have in your Git repositories and I know how perkamon
> works (more or less), but I want to propose you my desired workflow so
> we can collaborate in, my opinion, a better way. Here it is:
>
>  - Use a Git repository to store po4a configuration files and
> Makefile to generate POT files. (Done)
>  - Use a Git repository to store generated POT files, so any
> translation team can use it without knowing how POT files are
> generated.

I do not remember why I did not want to have POT files stored in Git.
Maybe it was because you have to use po4a anyway to build translated
manual pages, so providing POT files did not seem very helpful.

But I have been recently involved in the French translation of the
gnu.org website, and discovered that they use po4a to handle
translations.  Their workflow is:

  * HTML pages are stored in a CVS repository
  * a cron job generates POT files and msmgerge PO files
  * translation teams can either commit directly into the same
repository, or better use another CVS repository.  A Makefile is
provided to copy POT files from the main repository and msgmerge local
PO files, and another target copies updated PO files into the main
repository
  * a cron job generates translated HTML pages when PO files or
English HTML pages are modified

It seems to me that this quite similar to what you propose.  But in my
opinion, this will make sense only if there is a cronjob to provide
translated manual pages to translators, so that they do not have to
worry about po4a at all.

>  - Each translation team must create his own Git repository to store
> PO files and what they want, it could be a Makefile to generate man
> pages and pack them, or something similar.

Yes, we already do that for the French translation
  http://gitorious.org/perkamon/man-pages-fr/

> With this workflow, in my opinion, we could have a better and
> distributed organization.
>
> In debian l10n Spanish team, we are discussing it now, and we hope to
> collaborate with perkamon instead of creating our own linux man pages
> translation project. So what's your opinion?

There is another important point, which is the granularity of PO
files.  There are lots of files, and several strings are common to
many files.  When we started using po4a in the French team, we decided
to gather files by sections, IIRC this helps building translated
manual pages faster.
Translation teams who started more recently (I am aware of Russian and
German) decided to ignore this fact (because, unlike us, they started
from scratch and thus are not yet confronted to this problem).  They
use a compendium and put each manual page into its own PO file.
Later, we reorganized our sources, and now we have one PO file per
topic.  This is very helpful, because related pages belong to the same
PO file and it is thus simpler to ensure consistency between
translations.

So you have to decide whether you prefer having one POT file per
topic, or one POT file per manual page.

> Regards.
>
> PS: I'm not suscribed to perkamon mailing list, so please CC'ed me.

Done.  Sorry again for the delay.

Denis