[PLUTO-ildp] Fwd: Future of manpages-it

[Silvano Sallese]

Un saluto a tutta la lista!

Marco, il principale destinatario della mail eri proprio tu, ma ho
risposto io chiarendo che la traduzione non è abbandonata e che
l'assenza sul server del PLUTO dell'ultima versione tradotta è dipeso
da me per vari motivi.

A me pare molto interessante. E la gestione dei file PO
semplificherebbe notevolmente il lavoro. Ne avevo già iniziato la
conversione verso i po per una gestione tramite drupal sul nostro
server (il cms di test configurato è ancora qui
http://svavs.altervista.org/drupal628/), in stile transifex, ma il
progetto di Mario è molto valido anche se non prevede un cms a gestire
il tutto per una collaborazione tramite interfaccia web.
Con il metodo di Mario è sufficiente scaricare il po e seguire le
solite modalità di traduzione dei pacchetti gnome, ma mantenendo la
gestione a ILDP. La pacchettizzazione per le varie distro viene invece
gestita da loro, per quel che ne ho capito.
È un ottimo compromesso tra il nostro modo di lavorare tradizionale e
l'utilizzo di nuovi strumenti software e con una gestione più
centralizzata raggruppando quante più versioni internazionali.
Inoltre in questo modo forse verrebbero aggiornate anche le versioni
obsolete di debian che non è allineata con i rilasci ILDP, seppur
datati.

Unica cosa, come proposto da Andrea, manterrei una copia parallela e
sincronizzata su un nostro repository sfruttando le risorse del PLUTO.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
Da: Mario Blättermann <mario.blaettermann a gmail.com>
Date: sab 4 gen 2020 alle ore 10:46
Subject: Future of manpages-it
To: <ildp a pluto.it>, <marcocurreli a tiscali.it>
Cc: Tobias Quathamer <toddy a debian.org>, Helge Kreutzmann <debian a helgefjell.de>


Hello,

having a look at the current state of manpages-it, it seems that the
project has been abandoned. I don't recognize any activity since 2016,
and even the latest release 4.08 hasn't been packaged for any
distribution.

Regarding the translated man pages itself, the texts are not
up-to-date in most cases. Of course, it is quite difficult to update
such textual translations. Using po4a [1] makes it much easier through
using normal po files in a gettext based workflow.

Recently we (the developers of manpages-de) have merged the existing
German and French translations into a new project named manpages-l10n
[2]. After that, we have added Polish po files and imported some old
Dutch and Romanian translations. What about to also add the Italian
manpages there…?

The workflow of manpages-l10n is as follows:

Currently we support four distributions, Archlinux, Mageia Cauldron,
Debian Sid and Debian Buster (the latter will probably be replaced
with Debian Bullseye soon). We download packages according to our
lists in upstream/*/packages.txt. The manpages will be extracted from
the packages and po4a generates translation templates. The templates
will be merged with the existing po files. Because this usually
happens once or twice a month, the po files are almost in sync with
the original manpages from the distribution packages. After this, the
po files can be updated by the translators, and we roll out a new
release usually four or five times a year.

To limit the effort, we maintain some helper scripts and a compendium
for each language. The scripts can create new po files and fill them
with common strings from the compendium, format the po files and
remove some artifacts from older upstream versions, write changes from
a recently proofread po file to the compendium and write the changes
back to the other files, generate an addendum with the translator
names and license informations, and much more.

Have a look at the attachment. The tarball contains eight imported po
files, one for each manpage section. In »original« you see the
imported files as written from the last translator, and in »updated«
you see what you get after merging with the latest template. As far it
is was possible without speaking Italian, I have fixed some things,
like trivial formatting changes or some strings which appear in po
files but actually can be copied directly and don't have to be
translated.

Maybe you are wondering how it was possible to import all the texts
without speaking Italian at all: The existing textual translations
contain hints about the original text which translation it has been
derived from. So it was quite easy to download the appropriate package
(for example, manpages-3.53.tar.xz), unpack the manpages and create a
temporary translation template with po4a. As I already did with the
first eight files, I would do this for all existing files, so you
don't have to bother with the import and could concentrate on the
essentials: translating the manpages. Moreover, you don't have to
bother with the infrastructure, we do all needed updates for you.

If you can imagine to reanimate Italian manpage translations by
merging manpages-it into manpages-l10n, please let me know. We would
give you write access to the Git repository to simplify submitting
changes. If you agree, I would create a new Git branch, and once all
has been imported, the branch can be merged into master. But don't
expect too much, there remain 131 text files to import, this will take
a few weeks, maybe months.

[1] https://po4a.org/
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n

Best Regards,
Mario

-- 
Silvano Sallese                             silvano AT pluto.it
Italian Linux Documentation Project         http://www.pluto.it/ildp
PLUTO Web                                   http://www.pluto.it/web