[Aptitude-devel] I18n questions in aptitude development tree

[Daniel Burrows]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 02:34:29PM +0100, Sven Joachim <svenjoac at gmx.de> was heard to say:
> as a member of the German translation team I decided to tackle the task
> of translating aptitude's user manual.  I checked out the source tree:
> 
> hg clone http://hg.debian.org/hg/aptitude/head aptitude
> 
> and ran ./autogen.sh, but now I'm a bit uncertain how to proceed.  There
> are several questions/problems:
> 
> 1) There is no Makefile in the po/ directory, so `make' failed there.
>    How comes that?

  I'm not sure.  Are there any hints in the configure output?  Mine
finishes with:

(...)
config.status: creating src/generic/util/Makefile
config.status: creating src/mine/Makefile
config.status: creating tests/Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: config.h is unchanged
config.status: executing depfiles commands
config.status: executing default-1 commands
config.status: creating po/POTFILES
config.status: creating po/Makefile

> 2) The template for the user manual seems to be in
>    doc/po4a/aptitude.pot.  How is that file updated?  I don't want to
>    translate obsolete stuff.

  That's a good question.  It looks like that file is updated manually
when I run "make update-po" in doc/.  I haven't done that since December
(oops), but I'll take care of it once I finish some edits of the
documentation that I'm working on right now.

> 3) If I'm going to translate aptitude.pot as de.po, which files do I
>    have to edit to let this take effect?  I've found doc/po4a/po4a.cfg,
>    doc/po4a/Makefile.am and doc/po4a/po/Makefile.am.
>    Also, which commands (automake, autoconf, autoheader, configure,
>    make whatever) do I need to run when I add de.po to these files?

  It looks to me like you need to add de entries to po4a/po/po4a.cfg.
I'm not sure what you would need to add to doc/po4a/Makefile.am; it
looks like the French translation adds some stuff to the manual, but I'm
not sure what that is.  Of course, you'd need to add de.po to EXTRA_DIST
in doc/po4a/po/Makefile.am.

  The other thing you'd need to do is make adjustments in doc/de to
actually produce the documentation.  You can probably crib the necessary
Makefile instructions from doc/fr or doc/ja.

  Daniel