Re: I18n for man pages in GNOME

[Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net>]

Le lundi 25 juin 2007 �1:10 +0200, Helge Kreutzmann a �it :
> Hello Claude,
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 09:02:35PM +0200, Claude Paroz wrote:
> > Le lundi 25 juin 2007 �9:36 +0200, Helge Kreutzmann a �it :
> > > Hello,
> > > (please CC: me, I am not subscribed)
> > > 
> > > I am the Debian maintainer for goobox. The previous maintainer wrote an 
> > > (English) man page for goobox using Docbook. I translated this man
> > > page to German.
> > 
> > Before writing a more complete answer, I'd like to be sure we're talking
> > about the same thing. When you are referring to Docbook file, I suppose
> > it's the "regular" help file [1], open generally by Yelp through the
> > Help -> Contents menu item.
> > 
> > For me, a man page is in a classical (groff) man format.
> 
> Yes, the one you read using the man(1) programm. (I just checked, yelp
> is able to display them as well)
> 
> > But I may be wrong. Is it a special case with a Docbook source file
> > generating a man page? 
> 
> Yes. In principle, I could write a man page in groff, but using
> docbook allows me to concentrate on content rather than presentation.
> To be precise:
> <!doctype refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.1//EN" [
> ...
> 
> and convert it using 
> docbook-to-man debian/manpage/goobox.en.sgml > debian/goobox/usr/share/man/man1/goobox.1

Thanks, now it's clearer for me.

AFAIK, there is no translation toolchain for man pages in the GNOME
translation project, and I didn't find any translated man pages in GNOME
SVN.
Maybe someone with more experience in GNOME i18n could tell us if this
has already been discussed here.

Basically, I think this could be done on the same model that is
currently used for Docbook help, except adding the extra step of
generating man page with the appropriate tool.

More experienced hackers welcomed :-)

Claude