[Perkamon-devel] Using perkamon for German translation

[D. Barbier]

On 2014-02-25 20:42 GMT+01:00 Tobias Quathamer wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> Hi all,
>
> I don't know if this mailing list is still in use, but I'll give it a try.
>
> I'm the Debian and upstream maintainer of the manpages-de and
> manpages-de-dev packages. I'd like to know if we could join forces and
> use the same framework.
>
> I've had a look at perkamon quite a while ago, and I remember that you
> had all translations in one big .po file. That approach didn't work
> well for the German translation team, so I created an own framework
> for us.
>
> However, I've noticed that you split the translation into smaller
> chunks nowadays, so maybe perkamon could be a useful tool for the
> German team as well. How hard would it be to set up an initial
> infrastructure for German along with French? I would like to give
> perkamon a try, but before converting all our translations into your
> framework, I'd like to "play around" with it a bit. Would that be
> possible?

Hello Tobias,

For the record, we never had one single PO file, gettext does not work
well with huge files.  Anyway, this is not important.

The current infrastructure has been designed to work with multiple
languages: po4a configuration files are stored in the perkamon
project[1], and French manual pages have been moved into the
perkamon-fr project[2].  So you may manage your man-pages-de as we do,
this should work without trouble.  You do not have to switch to
gitorious, you can keep your files where you want.  In order to give
it a try, you can run (make sure to first fetch latest
man-pages-fr/Makefile from git, I just pushed some changes):
  $ mkdir test-de
  $ cd test-de
  $ cp <path-to>/man-pages-fr/Makefile .
  $ sed -i -e 's/fr/de/' Makefile
  $ make translate

This will download perkamon 3.60, create the po4a/ directory with
empty de.po files.  Populate them with your current strings by using
standard gettext tools.  You then do not have to worry about po4a
configuration files, I will take care of them, and you can focus on
translating your PO files.
The other targets are:
 - release
      creates perkamon-de-*.tar.xz, this tarball contains everything
to create man-pages-de; requires writing a README.de file, of course
this can be changed.
 - dist-de
      creates man-pages-de-*.tar.xz, an archive containing translated
manual pages
 - clean
      removes the build/ directory and temporary files
 - translate-dates and update-colophon are specific to French and must be edited

Please let us know what you think about our framework.

Denis

 [1] https://gitorious.org/perkamon/man-pages
 [2] https://gitorious.org/perkamon/man-pages-fr