[Po4a-devel] po4a README.maintainers

[Denis Barbier]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 10:27:26PM +0100, Nicolas François wrote:
[...]
> Detecting po4a's PO will permit to check that the POT are up-to-date and
> the POs also.
> (Denis and Thomas, correct me if I'm wrong)

IIRC when I moved Martin's robot to a Debian machine, I wanted to take as
little resources as possible because some developers considered that l10n
work was a waste of time and resources, and I did not want to fight
against them.  Thus only interesting files are extracted from source
packages, dpkg-source is not run.  As a consequence we cannot regenerate
POT files.

Another consequence is that we need those POT files in source packages,
some maintainers do not understand that.  But PO files are indeed checked
to make sure that they are up-to-date.

> Can you check if the attached file is clear enough? (is it too verbose?)
> Do you agree of the proposed file hierarchy?
> Does it represent your opinion?

It looks very good, yes.  I will give some comments below.

> BTW, there are currently 17 packages which build-depend on po4a:
> adduser, apt-build, apt-proxy, apt-show-versions, base-passwd,
> belocs-locales-bin, debarchiver, debhelper, deborphan, debsums,
> devscripts, fakeroot, glibc, mailliststat, pppconfig, smb2www, squashfs
> 
> dpkg (soon in experimental)

Of course po-debconf uses po4a (for more than 2 years), but pages were
generated by hand and not automatically.  This will be changed in
po-debconf 1.0 coming soon.

> apt, aptitude and debianutils may also switch
> 
> Kind Regards,
> -- 
> Nekral

> This document provides some general rules to deploy a translation process
> that will ease the work of maintainers (upstream and distribution
> maintainers) and translators (or translation teams).
> 
> 
> Translators usually retrieve a POT (for a new translation) or the current
> PO for their language, then they translate the untranslated strings and
> update the translation of the string marked fuzzy.
> 
> 
> Translators need to know if a PO has to be updated:
>  * they can verify the POs in the version control system or in the
>    distributed archives/packages
>  * they can be inform by the translation teams, which automatically
>    check the status of the POs in various packages.
> We want to avoid the translator to be notified by an user reporting that
> some strings are not translated even if the PO contain no untranslated or
> fuzzy string.

I do not understand this paragraph.  Translators need up-to-date PO
files, they should not have to deal with source files.

[...]
> A standardized architecture of the source tree will help the translation
> teams when they try to detect the POS that need to be updated.
> 
> Thus we recommend the following architecture:
> 
>   root
>    |
>    |-- doc, man, ...
>    |    |
>    |    |-- en
>    |    |    |
>    |    |    \-- original documents
>    |    |
>    |    |-- po4a
>    |    |    |
>    |    |    |-- po
>    |    |    |    |
>    |    |    |    |-- <package>.pot
>    |    |    |    |-- <lang1>.po
>    |    |    |    \-- ...
>    |    |    |
>    |    |    |-- add_<lang>
>    |    |    |    |
>    |    |    |    |-- <translator1>.add
>    |    |    |    \-- ...
>    |    |    |
>    |    |    \-- <package>.cfg
>    |    |
>    |    |-- <lang1>
>    |    |     |
>    |    |     \-- generated translations
>    |    |
>    |    \-- ...

You could also give another example when there are good reasons to have
several POT files, for instance:
  root/doc/en
           pkg1/po4a/
           pkg2/po4a/
           ...

Maybe small examples could be included in po4a distributions?

Denis