Re: Spanish translations & Mandrake 9.0 report

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hi, David!

> Here are some changes and updates for the Spanish help, messages and
> hint files. There are some tweaks for the English stuff, check them.

Thanks, applied.

> A sentence about termination in the editor was recently removed in
> mc.1.in. I think it was just a message to tell about the autoindent
> option available when pressing return and it had nothing to do with
> termination. I rewrote and reordered that piece in the Spanish help.

I have no idea what it means.  mc.1.in didn't have the word "termination"  
one month ago, according to CVS.

> There are some cosmetic changes about double vertical spacing in some
> pages. It would be nice to have a uniform appearance. I'm thinking of
> printing the manual page and see what does it look like.

I really appreciate that you are working on uniform appearance and
professionally looking documentation.  I wrote you in private, but I'll
repeat for the list - I want you to have write access to CVS and to be a
member of the development team.

> I was quite busy this week but I installed and I tried mc with Mandrake
> 9.0. It includes links 2.1pre2 and it seems that the -dump option has
> been removed. Sniff. You get a warning about it when viewing HTML files
> and I'm afraid that lynx is used instead.

That's my error.  Fixed in CVS.  links never used "-dump".

> Is it possible to have some checking for manpages location? Mandrake has
> its man pages stored in /usr/share/man. I use --prefix=/usr when
> compiling mc and I have to issue --mandir=/usr/share/man to get the
> manual there instead of /usr/man, which in turn doesn't exist and it's
> created by mc when you make install.

GNU Coding Standards differ from Linux Standard Base on this.  Autoconf
follows GNU Coding Standards, quite unsurprisingly.  I think we can change
the default for mc, but I believe it doesn't solve the underlying problem.

You can make a symlink or fix man to search both paths.  You can also ask
GNU and LSB guys to sit together and decide on the issue, but please make
sure they didn't do it already.

> I'm getting a warning about duplicated definitions for something about
> the mouse.

It looks like gpm in Mandrake uses the same symbols for the wheel buttons
as mc.  I'll have a look.

> I also get a warning about libcom_err versions.

Perhaps Mandrake compiled e2fsutils against old libraries?  I don't know.  
It's hardly related to mc.  Report to the Mandrake maintainer of
e2fsutils.

> I'm including the whole make.log compressed (10K, not too long I hope).
> I'm talking about latest snapshots, you know. I still have to fine tune
> the installation and check how does the wheel mouse behave; I got some
> messages about some liblow.c but I think it has to do with my laptop and
> the external and internal PS/2 mouse.

liblow.c is from gpm.  I guess mc is not quite compatible with the latest
gpm.

It's pretty depressing.  I'm spending so much time working on mc, yet the
project becomes more and more obsolete.  It has problems with Mandrake
gpm, with Red Hat S-Lang, it uses manpages with those bizarre groff
macros, that even GNU calls obsolete.

My only hope that the cleanup we are doing will make it easier for the new
contributors to join, although the new generation seems to prefer GUI.

> When updating the .po files I'm using make update-po and gettext 0.11.2
> and it seems to go fine. I used to do this with the update.pl and
> update.sh from CVS (old versions as I haven't used cvs for ages), but
> now I need to remove the --add-comments for getttext tools used inside
> the script. It's true that .po files weren't updated for snapshots and I
> was patching my own previous file.

Actually, it should be --add-comments=TRANSLATORS:, so that only comments
starting with "TRANSLATORS:" appear in the po-files.  That's what the
Makefile installed by gettext 0.11.5 does.  Fixed in CVS.  Thank you!

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin