Re: cvs commit to glibc-package/debian/packages.d by gotom
On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 12:08:17AM +0900, GOTO Masanori wrote:
[...]
> > IIRC French translations are available, do you want to ship them in
> > glibc-doc or should they go to manpages-fr?
>
> Hmm, it's a bit difficult issue. In first, I think they should go in
> manpages-fr.
>
> There are some points of view of this:
>
> * Whether translated manpages should go in upstream or not.
> * Whether translated manpages are only available on Debian or not.
> * Whether including French manpages which are only translated langueage
> should be in glibc package or not.
> * How to maintain French manpages in debian.
>
>
> Upstream supports info, not manpages, because GNU Project pushes info.
> So, I guess they don't hope the form of manpages.
This applies to English man pages too, there is no reason to have a
different treatment for localized manpages.
The main point is whether translated man pages are shipped by their
respective packages, or by a specific manpages-xx package. There
is no definitive rule, each maintainer decides whether he wants
to manage them or not, and this is his decision.
When packages are in the 'base' section, maintainers prefer not to
ship translated man pages in order to keep base small. But in other
cases, and especially for a -doc package, there is IMHO no reason not
to ship them.
> However, asking upstream about this issue is interested for me because
> we can know their stance about their document translation.
Well, they will surely answer that translations of their TeXinfo
documentation are welcome.
> BTW, I'm one of members in JM (Japanese Manpages) project
> (http://www.linux.or.jp/JM). JM distributes all translated manpages,
> like LDP (Linux Documentation Project). Debian has it named as
> manpages-ja. We (including me) translated linuxthreads manpages, and
> we decided that Japanese translations for linuxthreads went in
> manpages-ja, not glibc. There were some reasons: originally it was
> written by Xavier Leroy, then it was included in glibc. JM project is
> expert team to translate manuals in Japanese. Upstream seems not to
> care for manpages. Etc...
Sure, but current situation is different, because you included
English man pages ;)
> I don't know how manpages-fr and France translations are maintained.
> If you think it's suitable for including in upstream, we start to
> discuss with upstream (but I don't expect the good result!).
No.
> Or if you think each documentation/manual should go into original
> package, not manpages-*, hmm, I reconsider about this issue.
This is indeed my preferred choice, but you decide.
> If including in manpages-fr benefits something (for example, other
> distributions), you select inclusion for manpages-fr.
No, the manpages-fr package is not a valuable source of information
for other distributions, we only gather man pages from
http://perso.club-internet.fr/ccb/man/man-fr-0.9.7.tar.gz
http://www.delafond.org/traducmanfr/
> However, at least, I can't read French. If package maintainers may
> not care such translated manpages, such documents become out of date
> in future. It's not good.
Oh I understand now why #154401 has not been fixed ;)
There is a trivial solution: add inside a groff comment the last
modification date into your English man pages in a canonical way
(e.g. YYYY-MM-DD) and translators will keep it intact, so
you have a way to track down obsolete documentation.
If man pages are available via a public CVS repository, some
automation can be implemented, a good example is the SGML documentation
of boot-floppies.
Denis
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