Re: [Nano-devel] the man pages of nano...

[Mario Blättermann]

Hi Benno

Am 27.02.2015 um 21:50 schrieb Benno Schulenberg:
> 
> Hello Mario,
> 
> Version 4.0 of nano is on the horizon,
You mean 2.4.0 ...?

> and I have forgotten what the
> status is of running po4a on the nano source tree.  I seem to remember
> that you intended to post something to nano-devel, but I don't think
> you ever did.  Nor does there seem to be any bug open on this subject
> (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=nano).
> 
Indeed, there was a lot of other work in the meantime and I was forgotten the
nano man pages... sorry for that.

> Anyway, if it does not turn out to be rather complicated, I would like
> to get things so far that we can add a nano-man domain to the TP.  Do
> you have a simple example package?  One at which I could look to figure
> out how to add the po4a stuff to the nano Makefiles to create a POT file
> from the man page and create translated man pages from the future PO
> files?
> 

Well, there is an example even at TP (tin-man), but I don't know if it really
works, the current packages don't ship translated man pages.

I'm not really familiar with GNU autotools, and the instructions in the po4a man
pages are not that easy to understand. I found mkvtoolnix [1] where I've derived
the basic structure from. As far as I was able to figure out, we need a
configuration file like this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[po4a_paths] doc/man/nano.pot de:doc/man/de.po fr:doc/man/fr.po nl:doc/man/nl.po
uk:doc/man/uk.po

[type: man] doc/man/nano.1 $lang:doc/man/$lang/nano.1
[type: man] doc/man/nanorc.5 $lang:doc/man/$lang/nanorc.5
[type: man] doc/man/rnano.1 $lang:doc/man/$lang/rnano.1

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Probably this is not usable directly because mkvtoolnix uses Rakefiles (the Ruby
implementation of a Makefile) instead of Autotools.
Moreover, it still lacks of the ability to add po files on-the-fly, without
caring about which languages are present, so that rsync can be used to fetch the
latest translations without the need to keep them in the VCS. An idea: the
language list could be generated by "make dist" after fetching the po files,
because the final creation of the translated docs is at end users or packagers
side, respectively.

To process the config file, we need po4a, documentation about the tool itself
and its configuration is available from [2].

Unfortunately I'm just a translator without coding skills, even my knowledge in
building RPM packages doesn't help me to understand the process to be able to
implement it in an Autotools toolchain. Some experienced guy is needed here.

By the way, there's another simple example [3] which uses a plain Makefile. The
dummy files to demonstrate the workflow are written in LaTeX, but this shouldn't
matter at all. Again, no working example for a configure/make chain...

[1] https://github.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix/blob/master/doc/man/po4a/po4a.cfg
[2] https://po4a.alioth.debian.org/man/man1/po4a.1.php
[3] https://github.com/terceiro/po4a-example

Best Regards,
Mario