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outdated.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.
Indeed, this is the case. I'm willing to provide a new version of manpages-es, but we would need to weed out obsolete manpages first.
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.
I would be willing to support this work but my time is limited. If the files were moved in .po and then new Groff files are generated then I would work into making a new manpages-es released that included these files, we could also in the package point users to the project (to gather more contributors) when answering the question "Why is the manpage partially in
Spanish
and partially in
English
?"
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.
This would be fantastic, if you could do that liftup importing of Groff files it would be really appreciated.
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.
Please integrate Spanish, we should also announce it beyond the Debian spanish translation community (maybe bring it to the Ubuntu's community too?) as these manpages are not really Debian-specific.
In the meantime, I will register into the GIT repository and take a look at the current setup.
Thanks again for your proposal,
Javier