Hello,
On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 08:18:38AM +0100, Miroslav Kure wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 06:09:09PM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> >
> > "unfortunately", the german manpage is currently handled as a manual
> > XML translation of the original XML file, which doesn't scale very
> > well when changes are done to the original manpage.
>
> It depends how skilled you are with basic unix tools like diff.
Well, I don't know how aptitudes man page is handled, so this might
not be the case here, but the po format has also a distinctive advantage:
You get to know that a change happend (because *fuzzy* message
appear, which can easily be spotted by programms which send you
e-mail, write it on a web page etc.). I cannot remember having ever
received a note about a changed translated man page (without po).
And I simply don't have the time to locate each and every revision
control system (if any) and check for changes (which might have
happend upstream, or in Debian, or in a separate patch applied by
Debian ...). For po files you can find lots of web pages giving you
the stats, for man pages you can find lots of bug reports (like
this one) by users complaining that they are outdated.
> I like the current way of working with xml. It gives me much more
> freedom over .po.
> * I do not need to follow the original structure so closely
Yes, this is a major drawback, because especially around examples the
english version cannot be nicley translated into German also (e.g. the
english version manages to put the entire description *before* the
next paragraph with an example, while in German some words would have
to go *after* the example as well, which is impossible since there is
no paragraph there ...)
> * I can add footnotes or whole paragraphs specific for our language
I only know very few examples where language specific content should
be added, and sometimes (e.g. for charsets) this would be good for
upstream as well, but yes, there are (some) cases.
> * It is easier to locate the context
The po file is typically chronologically sorted, and you can easily
"build" the man pages in a second (x)term for preview/review.
But as far as I understood, this switch is an option, not mandatory.
Greetings
Helge
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann helge@helgefjell.de
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de
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