Bug#378899: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#378899: passwd: [Intl:de] German man page out of sync

[Helge Kreutzmann]

Hello,
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 06:04:37PM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Moreover, the "traditional" way to translate man pages is mostly
> inefficient as we see with these problems of outdated manpages....

Yes, I know. Also (as I just learned from dpkg) translators are not
notified even for Debian native packages when updates arrive, rather
the translated man page disappear (though this might have been a
packaging error, I'll wait for the reply to the bug report (379030)
before jumping to final conclusions).

> The use of po4a or poxml allows relying on the PO format to handle
> translation. The main advantage here is that the resulting informaiton
> is *always* up-to-date.
> 
> With po4a, at least, when a PO file for a given man page is incmplete,
> po4a assembles English and translated parts so that the result is
> exactly identical top the original English. In short only non fuzzy
> strings of the translation are used.

Yes, this sounds good. Are maintainers for translations notified when
updates are necessary? Otherwise a man page might silently turn english
without the maintainer noticing (I tend to seldom read the man pages
after translation, given that I've read them once very thoroughly).

> > Also is there some document which describes the change to po? As I
> > understood in this discussion, there are two po formats (po4a and
> > xmlpo or similar) in the loop? I'd prefer to work with sgml/xml if
> > possible (thats how I write my (translated) man pages as well).
> 
> 
> There are not two formats. The result is mostly the same: you
> translate a PO file, not a XML or ROFF file.

Well, I was thinking for the packages I maintain. Of course, I can
keep the german translation in sync manually (and the man pages are
not translated in other languages so far), but it still might make
sense some day to switch. So if there is a howto I'd interested.

> I really do *notù recommend using native format when PO is
> available. It does not guarantee that the translated man page will
> remain accurate.

Yes, of course. But so far for all man pages I translated, I was not
aware of a po-version (at least the maintainer of said packages did
not tell me about it, I actually did not check the source for it).

Thanks for taking care of this updating problem, it was really nagging
me quite a while and drove me off translating man pages a little as
well.

As a side note, do you think #253085 is obsolted by po4a and friends?

Greetings

            Helge
-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     debian at helgefjell.de
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
        64bit GNU powered                     gpg signed mail preferred
           Help keep free software "libre": http://www.ffii.de/
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