Re: [Po4a-devel] Bug#594831: debian-faq: Please, add po4a support

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 [Keeping the DDP mailing list CCed, and add the po4a developer list if someone wants to correct me or add other hints, don't hesitate to ask directly on po4a-devel of you have any problem.] Le 31/08/2010 14:54, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña a écrit : Great, I'm willing to help you in this task if you want, this remarks applies to others documentations as well. With Simon Paillard, we were considering to provide a template Makefile in order to give the opportunity to have something a bit unified for the DDP, but we also think it would be great to switch from DebianDoc to DocBook XML (I'm not sure which one needs to be done first, probably provide a template Makefile DocBook XML ready and a method to switch from DebianDoc would be the best thing to do). There is no full automatic tool to do that, but there are lots of hints in the “HOWTO convert a pre-existing translation to po4a?” part of po4a(7). I believe that this works needs to be done by a translator (it doesn't need to be done directly by the translator of the document, but a knowledge of the language translated is really helpful), since there is a need to “adjust” the translated or original document in order to perform the initial “gettextization”. I just gave some more hints on the debian-l10n-french mailing list in order to do so, may I try to translate this piece of advice here. A wiki page may be a good place to publish it if it could be of any help (I'm willing to edit the page, but please, give me a hint of *where* in the wiki it should be written, I'm still a bit lost there), or even the po4a(7) manual page (but I'm less sure: there is already a lot of information in it, and po4a is not debian-specific). *HOWTO perform gettextization on DDP* 1- Update each original page of the local repository to the version present on the header of the translated document, it usually looks like “<!-- Subversion revision of original English document "5108" -->” and then proceed to the initial “gettextization” as explained in po4a(7) (implies some local changes to the original or translated documentation in order to do so, keeping those changes will be helpful for the two last step, using “svn diff” on the translated directories might be enough). 2- Once the PO file obtained for this non up-to-date translation, perform an automatic unfuzzy. The strings will need to be checked by the translator, but this task can be done later: msgattrib --clear-fuzzy file-step1.po -o file-step2.po 3- Update the original version of the documentation on the local directory (“svn update”), and update the PO file using “po4a-updatepo”. The PO file obtained is ready for translation update. This file can then be sent to the official translator of the document if the three first step were performed by someone else (eventually provide the result of “svn diff” obtained in stage 1: sometimes the translation is a bit in advance on its own header, so the translator may pick back what he has already translated but was not included in the PO file). 4- Put back addenda, which are mainly used for translator credits, or language specific stuff, and eventually provide a po4a patch for the package if it is not yet available (which was the initial goal of this bug report). Cheers David P.-S.: Please note that some translators prefers to work using the current workflow (using svn to provide diff of the original translation and edit directly a translated document) rather than editing a PO file. Unless every translator of a document are willing to use PO files (e.g. developers-reference), it's probably best to let translator choose his own method: it's not a problem since both method can cohabit (e.g. maint-guide or debian-history). P.-P.-S.: The French translation for the debian-faq was not too much outdated, after the third stage, the PO file had the following statistics: 951t11f10u. I think Simon (the actual translator) agrees that it would be easier to maintain than around fifteen independent files currently needed to build the debian-faq.