Re: Monitor system (was: Re: Announce of the upcoming NMU for the dtc package
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 07:30:35PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> On 10/07/2008, at 6:34 PM, Jens Seidel wrote:
> >I told you already in the past that adding PO support for a new
> >language
> >is done in one minute. You don't need to depend on "upstream" support
> >for it as the Release Notes projects demonstrates (only a single
> >Makefile has to be added which contains some po4s specific targets).
> >It's fairly simple (at least it was for Release Notes).
> >
> >So just say: I want to work on ... Please send me the PO file. That
> >should be all.
> Jens, I'm just commenting that most of the docs in /manuals aren't
> using po4a.
That's right. Converting an existing and maybe outdated translation
to PO format is the hard thing, not starting a new translation which is
easy! Maybe it's also more complicated for DocBook XML as for SGML ...
> I don't know why, especially if it's as easy as you say. I
The plain XML (or whatever) file is more straight forward. Po4a is just
an additional layer. Some documents which very large paragraphs may also
not profit from PO. Maybe also po4a just didn't exist in the past, I don't
know.
In the past I preferred to work on the plain files as well but I think
this changed. I will also try to convert Po4a for the Subversion svnbook
which is currently handled without and nobody complained yet (because po4a is
unknown?) :-)
> would like to see more of the docs using po4a, and if all it takes is
> me requesting it, I'll try to find time to work on more of the docs.
That's great!
> I've already started working on the Debian FAQ, which has po4a in a
> branch.
>
> When I have time to catch up with debian-doc, maybe I can find out why
> po4a isn't been used more widely by doc maintainers.
It's more or less the task of a translator to create/fine-tune the
infrastructure. If you write an English book why should you learn about
PO files you will never need? Just one day you will recieve a
translation, add it to revision control and ship it but that's all.
Maybe some translators also prefer other formats ...
> Please don't take any of my emails as a criticism. I am interested,
Don't worry, I don't.
> and I like to contribute ideas and effort when I can, but I don't know
> enough about the project to object to the way things are handled, even
> if I were the cantankerous type, which I'm not. ;)
You do the hard work, translating Debian nearly alone is very, very time
consuming. Adapting a tool or a Makefile isn't :-)
Jens
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