Hi,
Andries, thanks for your reply.
On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 11:03:30PM +0200, Dutch GNU/LI List wrote:
> ------
> List: Dutch GNU/LI List
> Sender: "A.E. Brouwer" <aeb@win.tue.nl>
> Subject: Re: internationalizing help2man (was: Re: splitting manpages-nl ...)
> Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 23:03:30 +0200 (MET DST)
> ------
>
> > Brendan, do you think it would be a good idea to internationalize
> > help2man?
>
> It would probably be a small improvement in a few cases,
> and a big step backwards in other cases.
It would be a step backwards in those cases where a (translated) manpage
is available, which is of better quality than the .po file.
> For many GNU tools good man pages are available,
> that give information on standard invocation,
> GNU extensions, etc.
Wouldn't it be possible to stick the information these manpages supply
in the .po files, where the translation of the --help output is stored?
> For some mysterious reason GNU does not like to distribute
> the docs that their users prefer, and offers either info files,
> or really bad man pages, mechanically generated from a help text.
Do you consider these pages bad for the lack of information they supply,
or are there also other troubles with these?
> So, for the time being, as long as GNU does note want to
> distribute good man pages, it is better to translate the
> good pages that exist and distribute them separately.
Storing manpages in .po files makes it easy to track wether information
and translation are up-to-date. I believe the interface to commit new
translations in .po files is very functional, and easily accessible.
.po files are not manpages in the strict sense of the work, therefore
the `mysterious reason' might not apply, and one could use the
infrastructure to distribute translated manpages.
Indeed, this is more ambitious than to keep shipping translations
separately, but I feel overhead would be less, in the long run. (Otoh,
this idea just might be too little pragmatic to be viable...)
Any other opinions?
Bye,
Joost
PS: Mail-Followup-To set to debian-i18n@lists.debian.org (that list is
archived, doesn't mangle headers, and is not about one specific
language.)
--
. .
Joost van Baal . .
. . http://mdcc.cx/
. .
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