Bug#438676: hex-a-hop: Switch to po4a for man page translation

[Jens Seidel]

Hi Helge,

first of all sorry for ignoring your patch so long.

On Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 11:24:04PM +0200, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> As promised. Actually, its quite simple.
> 
> 1. Add the following line in your debian/rules, where X1, X2, X3, ..
>    are all languages you've received man page translations for:
>    po4a-updatepo -f man -m hex-a-hop.6 -p hex-a-hop.X1.po -p hex-a-hop.X2.po -p
> hex-a-hop.X3.po
>    This call will synchronise the various .po files with the original
>    (there is no .pot file involved!).

I do not like the fact that still another PO/POT file is involved.
Wouldn't it be easier for translators to have only one PO/POT file? This
way it is also possible to reuse common translations and to check for
consistency in the program and manual page.

I tried it but the problem is that all msg* commands I know deal only
with PO files but not with POT files (which contains placeholders such
as CHARSET).

A not so complicated solution would be to generate hex-a-hop.X1.po as
you suggest (it's indeed a POT file) and to skip the first paragraph
(up to first empty line) using:
 sed -n '1,/^$/ !p' hex-a-hop.6.pot > hex-a-hop.6.stripped.pot
Now hex-a-hop.6.stripped.pot could be concatenated with hex-a-hop.pot:
 cat hex-a-hop.pot hex-a-hop.6.stripped.pot > hex-a-hop.pot.new &&
 mv hex-a-hop.pot.new hex-a-hop.pot

But how to get rid of shared strings????

Could it be that it is impossible to handle this with one POT file?
Shouln't we file a few wishlist bugs against po4a, gettext, ...?

> 3. For each language you've received translations for, add the
>    following line in your debian/rules:
>    po4a-translate -f man -m hex-a-hop.6 -p hex-a-hop.Xi.po -a hex-a-hop.Xi.add -l hex-a-hop.Xi.6

This should work even if hex-a-hop.Xi.po contains more messages
(includes the master PO file), right?

> 4. Add the following note where other people can find it, e.g.
>    README.Debian:
> 
>    Note to translators:

Do you really think this belongs to README.Debian? It is an internal
detail (we also do not install the POT file in binaries -- only in
source). If we use only a single PO file we do not need to explain
anything, right?

> 6. Once you received hex-a-hop.vi.po, hex-a-hop.de.po,
>    hex-a-hop.de.add and possibly hex-a-hop.vi.add, copy them to
>    debian/.

Hey, what about Russian, Bulgarian, Dutch and Spanish :-?

Jens