[Perkamon-devel] Linux man pages translation to Spanish

[Francisco Javier Cuadrado]

2011/8/8 D. Barbier <bouzim at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>

You're right, I thought that because there is a lot of people who
doesn't know how to manage po4a and it woud be helpful to provide POT
files, but now like you said I see that it's not a great idea.

About cron jobs, in alioth you can't create a cron job? Because it
would be perfect to create a project with this kind of workflow.

So now, an overview could be:

  - A Git repository for po4a configuration and Makefile or a script
to generate POT files and merge with desired PO files.
  - A Git repository for each translation and Makefile or a script to
generate man pages, pack them and what they want to do.

And it would be perfect if we could automate it using cron jobs.

>>  - 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.
>

I like your way, organizing PO files per topic.

In summary, we (Spanish team) can start working because we only have
to generate PO files using your po4a configuration files and Makefile,
and use your Makefile to generate man pages from our translations.

>> Regards.
>>
>> PS: I'm not suscribed to perkamon mailing list, so please CC'ed me.
>
> Done.  Sorry again for the delay.
>
> Denis
>

Don't worry, everybody (even me) is busy or in holidays. :P

Thanks.

-- 
Saludos

Fran