On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:51:32 +0800 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote: > > I did start such a guide via my blog during DebConf8 > > > > http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/129-po4a-translation-support-from-any-format.html > > Would you (or anyone else) be willing to turn this into an article for > the development section of LWN to promote the use of po4a outside of > Debian? In case you need an incentive, LWN pay their writers. It's certainly appealing - however, there is a reason why this blog article didn't turn into the series of articles that I anticipated during DebConf8 - I haven't got suitable translations for the packages concerned, therefore the code suffers from a lack of real testing. (Payment is not an incentive for me - indeed it tends to complicate things more than anything else.) I was initially looking at revising and expanding on that article as a direct result of working with translations of the emdebian-tools manpages but there were simply too many strings for initial translator (who is part of the Emdebian project) to handle. I've since split the source package into 4 so maybe now is a good time to seek out translators for some of these manpages. (The content of the manpages has settled somewhat over the intervening time as well, which will help.) I'll start the process on debian-i18n. (1 of the 4 has no translatable content - emdebian-archive-keyring.) I can then use the process of improving and adapting the build system for these packages according to complete the documentation, file bugs against po4a etc. In that respect, Policy is ahead of my available time. :-( If there is a different package already using po4a with an established build system hook, let me know. OTOH if people here think that the blog itself is sufficient for an LWN article, once reworded and rephrased, then I might consider doing the LWN article in stages too - however I do think it is worth having some translations to work with before claiming that the code snippets included in the original blog entry are sufficiently robust for a more authoritative document like LWN. The three source packages with po4a support already are: emdebian-tools (1743 entries) 385kb POT file emdebian-rootfs (384 entries) 65kb POT file emdebian-grip (531 entries) 115kb POT file I think I'll start with emdebian-rootfs - the strings haven't changed much in recent releases. The time needed for translations to be made means that I should be off VAC before I need to do much with the code. There is also the proviso that although po4a is very good at what it does, issues remain that are difficult to fix but which jar when compared to how the same issues are handled in program or debconf translations. e.g. skipping some strings and adding comments for translators that do not show up in the generated manpages. I should have filed bug reports about these things ages ago but ran out of time. With real translators and real translations at hand, these things should be easier to describe in bugs and easier to test potential fixes. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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