[Pkg-shadow-devel] Re: Please push shadow-4.0.3-31sarge2 to sarge

[Nicolas François]

Hi!

It seems the process is going to be

   groff -----------> XML ------------> POT
             (1)               (2)       |
                                         |  (3)
                                        \|/
   groff <----------- XML <------------ PO
             (5)               (4)

(1): doclifter (+ manual fix)
(2), (4): xml2po
(5): ??

(If there were a tool for (3), I think we would know ;)

Here are some comments/question on these steps.
(Tomasz, don't forget I'm a po4a developer, some of the comments may be
biased;)

(1): I had a look at some XML generated by doclifter (in upstream CVS)
     Some commands were not recognized as commands:
     <emphasis remap=\"B\">chsh</emphasis>
     The seealso section could be more translator friendly, but it is not
     a big deal.
     It has the expected verbosity of XML (not a big deal with cut&paste)

     It seems the XML generated by (1) needs some manual fixes. It means
     that the XML file will be the original document (in which we will
     make modifications). Is this what you plan?

     Maybe doclifter can be configured to avoid some of the above issues.
     
(2): I had a look at the PO files generated by xml2po with the XML
     generated by doclifter.
     I think the man page is split in too many blocks. This may put
     difficulties to the translators.
     It has the expected verbosity of XML (not a big deal with cut&paste).
     There could be some spaces problem for the step (5). But, well, it
     will depend on the tool used on (5).

     Here again, maybe a customization of xml2po is feasible.

     Also, we should see how (1) + (2) behave after some small
     modification on the original groff page (does it fuzzy a lot of
     strings?)

(4): after the translation, there are some spaces difference with the
     original XML. This may or may not be a problem depending on (5).
     

(5): no tool was found at this time.
     Maybe there is no need for a tool if texinfo accepts XML (but the DTD
     will be different, so a tool (maybe XSLT) will anyway be needed)

     I thought the XML was a docbook DTD, so I tried docbook-to-man and
     docbook2man, but I failed (maybe it is just a configuration issue)

     Tomasz pointed xmlroff, I did not tried it at this time.


Tomasz, I don't think you should spend too much time on the XML
conversion, at least while we don't have a tool for (5).


Now, I will try to defend po4a (you can pass this if you just think I'm a
po4a extremist ;)

Here are the 2 main advantages I can see:
 * po4a allows to reuse the existing translations (I can show it to you on a
   Polish page; and I can assure you that I won't cheat by translating the PO
   myself).
 * It is only one tool (time will tell if it means less bugs)


> Seems it is realy much better solution than using po4a 
> because using XML allow realy keep all ducumentatuon in one/common/good 
> style.

Does it means you want to trash the PO after the translation and only keep
the XML files?

po4a keeps also all the documentations in one/common style, which is the
one from the original document (roff for man pages, XML for XML documents
or TeX for TeX documents).
Note that I did not commented on "good" (I don't think roff is good, and I
don't think XML is good neither ;)


> For now texinfo tools allow generate XML files from .texi .. after prepare
> info viewer which will allo operate on XMLed info pages abowe will allow 
> in future system with documentation in ONE format :)

If it is the same DTD as the one doclifter uses...
Do you have any pointer on this subject?


> Imagine .. man pages with embeded multimedia presentation ;o)

It will dramatically change the man page of a simple editor for X;)

-- 
Nekral