Re: Status of manpages-de?

From: Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
Date: Sun Aug 21 2005 - 09:27:49 CEST

Peter Niederlag wrote:
> Maybe I am allowed to come back to some more general issues again though.

Of course!

> What is the goal of the manpages-de project? Are you trying to rather
> provide your own approach to writing a manual page or are you trying to
> keep in synch with the upstream man-pages?

The goal is to provide a German translation of the man-pages package,
synced, of course. However since a lot of such pages have already
been translated it becomes more and more important to work on section
1 pages of common applications as well.

At the beginning, LunetiX has translated many section 1 pages for
their famous Linux-Anwenderhandbuch which have been contributed to
manpages-de, but hardly ever kept in sync with upstream alas.

> How about parts of manpages that have not been translated yet? Rather
> drop them or include them untranslated ?

I'm not sure I understand. A German translation should be German, not
English or Swedish.

> At least I noticed that the 'find' manpage differs quite a little bit
> from the upstream manpage. Never thought about that before. ;)

The reason is that the German translation is probably some 8 years old
and things have changed in upstream find.

> Especially the examples in my opinion are a great deal of help in *any*
> manpage so I do miss them in manpages-de/man1/find.1. I'd rather like to
> see them in there untranslated than leaving them out.

I agree that examples are very helpful. This is a gap in the original
manpages as well for many pages.

> Anyway I just made an effort to merge in some changes from the original
> find manpage and adjust Section Synopsis and the overall structure to
> the upstream manpage. You find my unified diff to *latest CVS* as
> attachement.

I've used the German translation of it at once and contributed more
translation by myself. I've stripped off the English text before
committing, though.

During translation it is quite helpful (and indeed the preferred
method) to copy the the original page into the translation, but it
needs to be translated before committing.

> Before going any further into this I'd like to know if this work would
> make any sense.

It does a lot. Please continue.

Regards,

        Joey

-- 
This is GNU/Linux Country.  On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.
Received on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:27:49 +0200

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