Translated man pages of util-linux will move to the upstream project

[Mario Blättermann <mario.blaettermann@gmail.com>]

Dear translators,

the manpages-l10n project [1] hosts man page translations of the
util-linux tools [2] for some years. Because this external approach
has some disadvantages, the .po files will be moved to the GNU
Translation project soon. Besides the conversion of the source files
from *.roff to asciidoc, the localization using po4a [3] has been
enabled in util-linux itself. A translation template is already
available from [4] (will still be moved to another location in the
project tree, probably po-man/, see [5]).

To mention, in manpage-l10n we have .po files for util-linux man pages
in German, French, Spanish and Polish. I'm already working on the
import of the existing files. This will need at least a few weeks,
maybe months. Because util-linux v2.37 will be released soon and the
template will then be available from a newly to be created TP domain:
Please don't start with the translation into the mentioned languages,
to avoid double work! I will send the prepared .po files to you or
your mailing lists once I'm finished with the import. Of course,
translators of other languages can start as usual. The early
publication of the template is only to give translators of other
languages as much time as possible for their work.

A util-linux tarball *including* translated man pages will not be
released before the import has been finished, this means, possibly
during the lifecycle of util-linux 2.37 (in one of the v2.37.x bugfix
releases), or even later, with v2.38 in autumn this year. Otherwise it
would be too difficult to avoid file conflicts in distribution
packages. In manpages-l10n, we need either to keep all affected .po
files or remove them all in once. If we would try to remove only some
files partially, it would be almost impossible to consider all
imaginable file conflicts. That's why we postpone the activation in
util-linux for the time being.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n
[2] https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux
[3] https://po4a.org/
[4] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karelzak/util-linux/master/man-common/util-linux-man.pot
[5] https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/pull/1271

Best Regards,
Mario