Hello,
On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 06:53:28PM +0100, Nicolas François wrote:
> It seems that some German man pages are not the translations of the
> current English man pages. Can you have a look at it, and see if they
> need an update?
Many german man pages are *not* the translation of the original
english ones. Some appear to be written from scratch, even, and include
reference to german only resources. This probably was done with good
intentions, but, as you point out, has some unfortunate consequences:
> The -s options is not documented.
> The options are not documented
> The current German translation is far smaller.
So people reading only the german man pages would miss functionality
or, even worse, would refer to outdated version (e.g., options
changed).
> Can you provide an update as a bug to the shadow package, or indicate if
> the man page is so outdated that it should be dropped (if it will mislead
> users), or just add an indication that German users can read the more
> up-to-date English man page with "man -L C <...>".
Joey, I think this would be a good idea, if we went through the german
man pages and added a *prominent* note into all man pages which are
not a current translation. This would not only help users, who could,
if in doubt, refer to the english original, but also help translators
who could quickly figure out if a man page needs updating.
Nicolas: How do you handle updates in french? Do you think it would be
feasible to set up some kind of database (e.g., hash values) of
upstream man pages, and whenever this hash values changes by a new
upload, some tool could determine that the translation become
outdated?
> The French translation was handled with po4a, which permits to translate
> the man pages using a PO file, and permits to ease future updates of the
> translation). You can have a look at the man/fr directory in the shadow
> source package. If you want to use po4a, don't hesitate to mail me for
> any question you have (e.g. I can prepare you the po4a conf file, provide
> the POT file, and fill it with the current translation).
Do you propagate po4a to upstream, i.e., would other languages benefit
from it as well, or is this an internal tool within the french
translation team?
How do other list memebers think (including Joey), should we switch
over to po4a as well? Given that I've researched and discussed the
issue of the synchronization of translations of man pages with new
versions and there does not seem to be *the tool*, I guess this is the
best route to get.
Greetings
Helge
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. Helge.Kreutzmann@itp.uni-hannover.de
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