[pacman-dev] Translation of man pages

[Mario Blättermann]

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. Although the man page
translations are already maintained in the manpages-l10n project [2]
for some years, I think it is it better to use Pacman's upstream tree
instead. The external maintenance has some disadvantages: We download
distribution packages, create the templates, translate them and
release the translated man pages some months later. Besides this
delay, we don't know how many users know about the existence of the
translated versions. Having the translations in the upstream project
(translated using Transifex) would be better, and the localized
versions would be released with Pacman itself and always in sync with
the English ones.

See the attached patch and config file. The patch manpage-markup.diff
fixes the Asciidoc markup to get Po4a [3] properly working. After
applying the patch, put po4a.cfg in doc/po/. I've imported German,
Brazilian Portuguese and French translations from manpages-l10n, but
even compressed they
are too big for the list. The .po files will follow in separate
mails.To test the creation of the translated
Asciidoc files, just run 'po4a po4a.cfg'. This command creates a
translation template and a subdirectory for each language and saves
the resulting files there.
Once you have the Asciidoc files, they can be processed further like
those in doc/.

Unfortunately, I don't have neither Autotools nor Meson knowledge,
maybe someone else can help with integration into the build systems?

[1] https://archlinux.org/pacman/translation-help.html#_translating_manpages
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n
[3] https://po4a.org/index.php.en

Best Regards,
Mario
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: manpage-markup.diff
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 2618 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/attachments/20210521/badbe9ae/attachment.bin>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: po4a.cfg
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 1136 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/attachments/20210521/badbe9ae/attachment.obj>