[Was: Re: Bug#470277: manpage of accept(2) has type int (3rd parameter)] [CCed linux-man, previous and current French translators, and German maintainers -- Es tut mir Leid, die Liste auf English zu schreiben...] Hi Daniel, On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 9:07 PM, Daniel Kobras <kobras@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Michael! > > On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 05:32:58PM +0100, Michael Kerrisk wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Steffen Wendzel <cdp_doomed@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > 2.78-1 was the manpages-dev version. As I already told, the related > > > package isn't manpages-dev, it is manpages-de-dev. > > > > Ahhh -- okay. It;s a shame the the DE version still has this. It was > > fixed in the English pages years ago. > > It's a shame indeed. From my view, the core of the problem (apart from > the usual lack of manpower) is the absence of an adequate tool to handle > translations: We don't know that we're missing significant updates until > we manually cross-check the German translation to the current English > original. Which is so tedious that it's rarely done. Do you happen to > know how other translations of the manpages project handle this problem? Here's the info I know about translations: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/translations.html (No one has sent me info on the state of the German translation, so I've not created an entry on this page.) Andries Brouwer (the previous maintainer) has an out-of-date page here: http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/man/index.html Bottom line: the only translation I know that is full and up to date is the French translation, but it serves as an excellent example of what is possible. Note the following: * The state of that translation is down to *one* person, Alain Portal, who built on the earlier work of Christophe Blaess. * The French translation focuses on translating just the pages from the man-pages package -- http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ . There are 830+ pages there, and I believe only about 4 or 5 English pages remain untranslated. As far as I'm aware, every translated page is up to date -- Alain can confirm. (Alain also translates a handful of other pages that are not in man-pages, but I know little about that.) * Since man-pages-2.03 or so, when he took over the translation project (mid-2005), Alain's approach has been to translate each English release. Back then he had to play catch up, since the French pages were at version 1.57. (See http://linux-man-pages.blogspot.com/2007/12/man-pages-fr-2740-est-sorti.html ) In other words, there are corresponding English and French versions of man-pages 1.58 through to 2.76. (My current release is 2.79, so Alain is just three releases behind me -- qu'est-ce que c'est passé, Alain? -- and lately he stays pretty close.) * One thing that helps Alain -- aside from his extraordinary energy and commitment -- is that he uses my changelogs: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/changelog.html The changelogs are detailed and fairly accurate. In general the only things that don't get logged against individual pages are spelling fixes, grammar fixes, and minor formatting fixes, all of which don't matter too much to translators. Still, Alain keeps me honest by doing diffs against my successive releases, and he occasionally catches me out. * Alain started in a better position than most other translators, because the French translation was reasonably complete already. However, it was far from easy. When he took over, I believe that not all of the pages in man-pages-fr-1.57 were actually completely up to date with respect to the English man-pages-1.57. So I assume he did a lot of checking of the existing pages at some point. (He can perhaps confirm.) Also, there has been a lot of churn over the 90 or so releases that Alain has translated. Something like 85 new pages between 2.00 and 2.76, and many many changes to existing pages, including some major global clean ups of formatting and layout, all of which Alain has replicated. == My advice, for what it's worth, on how to bring manpages-de up to date: do what Alain did. (When Alain started out with his approach, I thought it was wrong, that it would create too much work for him to ever be able to catch up with me. I was wrong.) * Separate out the pages that don't come from the upstream man-pages package into a different -de package. (This mostly means some section 1 and 8 pages that are in manpages-de.) * Pick a recent version of the English man-pages package -- lets say it's version XY. Aim to bring the German pages current with that version. Break the effort down into parcels of (say) 10 English pages, which are handed out to volunteers. Find at least 10 volunteers. Each volunteer takes a parcel, reviews the current German page against its English equivalent, and either + brings it up to date with that version + writes a translation of the page, if there is no translation yet; or adds the page to a list of to-be-translated pages that some other volunteers deal with. And keep going until all the parcels and translations are done. * Once manpages-de is up to date with man-pages-XY, which I suppose will take a while, then use my changelogs to make one for one translations of man-pages-XY+1, man-pages-XY+2, etc., until you've caught up with whatever release is current. Find some volunteers(s) who have the time to follow my changelog and apply the changes in each subsequent release in a timely fashion. == Is that a lot of work? Hell yes. But Alain has single-handedly shown what's possible. Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Maintainer of the Linux man-pages project http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Want to report a man-pages bug? Look here: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
