Re: Bug#493007: debian-policy: Please recommend tracking translation status of l10n man pages
> Currently it is not possible to (reliably) decide, whether an
> translated man page is up to date or not. In fact quite a few
> translations are outdated (missing newer parameters and other
> information) or not a translation at all but a rewrite for a previous
> version. While this is an upstream issue, debian maintainers should be
> aware of this problem and activly talk to their upstream to resolve
> this problem. Thus I suggest the following patch for debian policy:
>
> countries.[4]
>
> + If a loclized man page for a certain command is provided, it should
> + either be up to date or it should be clearly visible that this version
> + is outdated (either by a note in the beginning or by showing the
> + missing/changed parts in English instead of the target language).
> + Where the build system of the localized man page does not provide the
> + option to enable this Debian developers and maintainers are asked to
> + take this issue to their upstream to resolve.
> +
> + If Debian developers themselves provide a framework to support
> + localized man pages this framework must fulfill the requirements of
> + the previous paragraphs. In this case it is recommended to use po4a
> + for localization.
> +
> Due to limitations in current implementations, all characters in the
After reading the thread, I propose the following reduced version of
this patch. It omits some of the more specific instructions (as
discussed), which can be covered in the devref, and it also avoids the
assumption that the original man page is in English. By and large, it
will be, but I think we have some software specific to localization or
language support where the original documentation may be in a language
other than English. Translations into English would need to meet the
same guidelines.
How does this look to everyone?
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -8885,6 +8885,15 @@ name ["<var>syshostname</var>"]:
characters outside that range may be found in
<manref name="groff_char" section="7">.
</p>
+
+ <p>
+ If a localized version of a manual page is provided, it should
+ either be up-to-date or it should be obvious to the reader that
+ it is outdated and the original manual page should be used
+ instead. This can be done either by a note at the beginning of
+ the manual page or by showing the missing or changed portions in
+ the original language instead of the target language.
+ </p>
</sect>
<sect>
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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