Future of manpages-es
Hello all,
for a very long time, Debian shipped Spanish man pages, provided by
the PAMELi project [1]. But this is to be considered as dead for
fifteen years, and the translated versions became more and more
outdated. So it happened that the manpages-es package has been kicked
out of Debian. Buster still provides manpages-es_1.55, but Bullseye or
Sid don't contain in anymore.
I'm involved in the manpages-l10n project [2] which maintains man page
translations in different languages, based on .po files instead of
static Groff or Mdoc files. Such a text based translation is OK so
far, but once it needs to be updated, it becomes messy. That's
probably the reason why we had many of similar, language-based
translation projects around the millenium, but most of them have been
abandoned. The last release of manpages-es was in 2005.
If someone of you is willing to work on such translations, I would
create a framework for Spanish and import the existing Groff and Mdoc
files into .po files and merge with the latest translation templates.
To learn more about our workflow, have a look at the file
CONTRIBUTING.md [3] in our Git repo. Contributors can get write access
to our Git repo immediately, in the hope that nothing goes wrong ;)
Some basic knowledge of the Git commands would be very beneficial, of
course.
Don't expect too much, importing this old stuff is often subtle. But
while importing from Dutch, Romanian, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese
I was really surprised what it yields after all these years. Importing
all the 660 Spanish files will take some time, maybe a few months,
maybe a year. But believe me, it's worth the effort, and keeping the
.po files up-to-date is much easier than to bother with the static
stuff. For convenience, we maintain a compendium for each language
which simplifies the work with gettext messages which appear more than
once in the different .po files. And moreover, we have a collection of
scripts which make it easy to create new files, reformat existing .po
files, getting a translated man page for review and so on.
Currently we support seven languages; it would be nice if we could
integrate Spanish, too. The current translation state is available at
[4], of course, Spanish translations would also get such an overview,
which will be updated after each commit.
[1] https://ditec.um.es/~piernas/manpages-es/
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
[4] https://manpages-l10n-team.pages.debian.net/manpages-l10n/index.html
Best Regards,
Mario
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