Debian Bug report logs - #710523
i18nspector: Please i18n man page

Full log

Message #8 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

Received: (at 710523) by bugs.debian.org; 15 Jun 2013 00:13:28 +0000
From [email protected] Sat Jun 15 00:13:28 2013
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.2-bugs.debian.org_2005_01_02
	(2011-06-06) on buxtehude.debian.org
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-10.8 required=4.0 tests=BAYES_00,FOURLA,
	FROMDEVELOPER,GENDER,HAS_BUG_NUMBER,MURPHY_DRUGS_REL8,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED,
	T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD,X_DEBBUGS_NO_ACK autolearn=ham
	version=3.3.2-bugs.debian.org_2005_01_02
X-Spam-Bayes: score:0.0000 Tokens: new, 12; hammy, 151; neutral, 145; spammy,
	0. spammytokens: hammytokens:0.000-+--manpage, 0.000-+--H*M:jwilk,
	0.000-+--H*F:U*jwilk, 0.000-+--H*r:jwilk, 0.000-+--HX-Debbugs-No-Ack:please
Return-path: <[email protected]>
Received: from master.debian.org ([82.195.75.110])
	from C=NA,ST=NA,L=Ankh Morpork,O=Debian SMTP,OU=Debian SMTP CA,CN=master.debian.org,[email protected] (verified)
	by buxtehude.debian.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:DHE_RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1:128)
	(Exim 4.80)
	(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
	id 1Une7U-0006Sb-5x
	for [email protected]; Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:13:28 +0000
Received: from jwilk by master.debian.org with local (Exim 4.80)
	(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
	id 1Une73-0008RV-Mj; Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:13:01 +0000
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 02:13:24 +0200
From: Jakub Wilk <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Bug#710523: i18nspector: Please i18n man page
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <20130531155649.GA19489@Debian-50-lenny-64-minimal>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20130531155649.GA19489@Debian-50-lenny-64-minimal>
X-Debbugs-No-Ack: please
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)
Sender: Jakub Wilk <[email protected]>

* Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]>, 2013-05-31, 17:56:
>Please add a framework for providing localized man pages, possibly 
>using po4a or similar tools.

I don't plan to add such a framework upstream, at least for the time 
being. Of course, the Debian maintainer is free to implement it on his 
own if he wishes so. :)

>However, po4a currently does not support your native format (i.e. 
>reStructuredText), so either you base the translation off the generated 
>man page

I played with po4a a bit, and I run into a few problems:

1) po4a doesn't support ".de1" requests, which is what rst2man uses:
http://bugs.debian.org/710678

2) rst2man translates ' to \(aq, which is then left intact by po4a. I 
think that would be nuisance to translators. I wanted to use 
--smart-quotes to work around this problem, but that didn't work:
http://bugs.debian.org/712284

3) po4a puts wrong timezone to POT-Creation-Date:
http://bugs.debian.org/710695

Fortunately 1) and 2) are easy to work around. With i18nspector 0.10 
(hopefully to be released over this weekend), it'll be possible convert 
the manpage to a PO file using these options:

po4a-gettextize -M UTF-8 -f man -o groff_code=verbatim -o unknown_macros=untranslated

The resulting file will contain quite a few messages that are not 
supposed to be translated, like tag names. They can be easily filtered 
out by msggrep:

msggrep -v -X -E -e '^type: (SS|IP|TH)$'

>or you check with the po4a maintainers to get reStructuredText 
>included.

A few months ago someone proposed a patch to add minimal support for 
reST:
https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/po4a-devel/2012-November/002158.html
I haven't tried the patch in practice, but I have I hunch that it 
wouldn't work reasonably well...

There's yet another approach possible. Sphinx, which can be used as a 
reST->man converter, supports translations:
http://sphinx-doc.org/latest/intl.html#internationalization

I played with it too, but I wasn't impressed with the results:
https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/1182
https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/1183
https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/1192

-- 
Jakub Wilk

Send a report that this bug log contains spam.