[pacman-dev] Translation of man pages

[Mario Blättermann]

Hello Allan,

Am Do., 3. Juni 2021 um 06:09 Uhr schrieb Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:
>
> On 22/5/21 2:51 am, Mario Blättermann wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > the translation help page [1] says:
> >
> > ---
> > There are currently no efforts underway to include translated manual
> > pages in the pacman codebase. However, this is not to say translations
> > are unwelcome. If someone has experience with i18n man pages and how
> > to best include them with our source, please contact the pacman-dev
> > mailing list at pacman-dev at archlinux.org.
> > ---
> >
> > OK, then let me introduce my approach.
>
> <snip>
>
> Thanks - this approach looks good to me.  We had someone on IRC suggest
> the same approach independently of this patch too!
>
> Just checking before I pull all this together:
>
> 1) are you happy is I use your name and email in the commit log.
>
Yes, of course.

> 2) are the translated manpages published under any license?  Just making
> sure that importing them does not create issues...
>
The manpages-l10n project publishes the translated man pages under
GPLv3+. However, some downstream packagers decided to mention all the
upstream licenses in their packages (see [1]), but as far as I can
evaluate, our translations are - regarding the license - rather
independent from the English originals. So using GPLv3+ in general
should be a good choice. And the Pacman man pages are GPLed anyway.

> 3) are there languages other than German, Brazilian Portuguese and
> French already available?

No, at least there's nothing known to me. Some years ago I started
with the German translations from scratch, later the Brazilian
Portuguese translations by Rafael were added, and then I found a few
unmaintained and outdated French translations, residing in the AUR for
a long time [2]. These I've imported and added to manpages-l10n.

Note, to avoid file conflicts, it is important to have a deadline for
the inclusion of translated man pages in Pacman itself. As soon as
they are available from the official package, I need to roll out a
bugfix release of manpages-l10n without the Pacman .po files.

BTW, due to the latest changes in libalpm, we don't have static
asciidoc sources anymore. I don't know how we could generate
translation templates within the Doxygen workflow, maybe it is
impossible at all. AFAIK, the only output format usable with Po4a is
»man page« [3]. Just an idea: To get a translation template for the
libalpm man pages, we let Doxygen generate some temporary *roff files
and use po4a to create an extra template on the fly which we provide
on Transifex. I anyway think it makes sense to split the translations
into an end user part (sections 1, 5, 8) and a developer part (section
3). But there's no need to host the template in the Git repo -- the
Pacman tarball would only ship .po files (if any) and create the
translated versions downstream. But let's focus on the Asciidoc based
man pages first and get them properly working; the Libalpm stuff can
be done later.

[1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/man-pages-l10n/raw/rawhide/f/man-pages-l10n.spec
[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/man-pages-pacman-fr/
[3] https://www.doxygen.nl/manual/output.html

Best Regards,
Mario