Re: Translation of the man pages: good/bad idea?

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Vincent,

Yesterday at 15:31, Vincent Untz wrote:

> We're shipping some manpages with GNOME. Today, I discovered po4a[1].
> It seems it enables an easier translation of the manpages.

It's a good idea, especially since new Yelp release will support
displaying man pages (2.6 didn't support it, 2.10 didn't go out
officially as Gnome 2.10 component even if it supported it :). 

Also note that with manpages which are in .xml format (they use a
subset of DocBook, and are transformed in a very simple manner: there
is an example in gnome-doc-utils/xml2po, since we ship a manpage with
it produced from DocBook :) one can use xml2po to translate them (we
should probably implement that for xml2po to show off that it's easy
to do :).  But then again, Yelp can better handle DocBook itself, so
it's dubious it's any good to convert to manpage format anyway :)

> Do we want to translate the manpages too? If yes, would using this tool
> help?

Yes, po4a is pretty useful for many formats.  Since it works with bare
nroff format, it's best for final man pages (not the source format we
sometime use to generate manpages).  But, I wasn't able to find any
non-XML originating manpages in gtk+, and I didn't check any further :)

> What do you think?

Now, we only need someone to go ahead and work on the supporting
infrastructure :)

Cheers,
Danilo