Re: internationalizing help2man (was: Re: splitting manpages-nl ...)
[following up on an ooooold message]
On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:20:42PM +0200, Joost van Baal wrote:
>[Sorry for crosspost, Mail-Followup-To set to
>debian-i18n@lists.debian.org]
>
>On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Ivo Timmermans wrote on
>debian-i18n@lists.debian.org:
>> Ideally, the Dutch (and other) manpages should be distributed together
>> with the upstream sources. Fileutils for example should install its
>> translated manpages itself.
>
>Indeed. I started looking at how to implement such a thing. Currently,
>the GNU tools use help2man by Brendan O'Dea to convert the stuff
>binaries give when invoked with --help to a manpage. help2man supports
>english only; therefore all alternative --help texts, included in .po
>files, do _not_ get converted to manpages, and only an english manpage
>gets installed. I believe the best thing to do would be to
>internationalize help2man. Once that is done, GNU packages could
>provide a hook to install manpages in other languages.
>
>Brendan, do you think it would be a good idea to internationalize
>help2man?
Indeed, it is certainly a very good idea and one I've wanted to persue
now for some years, although up until recently there's not been a any
reasonable way to extract the strings from perl code for translation.
Denis Barbier filed a bug a little while ago on help2man with a patch to
provide some i18n support for help2man.
I've subsequently been able to cruft up a script (using the perl
compiler) to produce a .pot file for help2man, and with additional
translations/advice/patches from Denis have now released help2man 1.30.1
which includes a --locale option to produce manual pages in any language
supported by both the progran and help2man (currently only fr_FR).
Enjoy.
--bod
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