Quoting Michael Kerrisk (mtk.manpages@googlemail.com):
assurer un travail collaboratif. C'est une chose à laquelle je pense depuis bien longtemps [3], mais je n'ai toujours pas trouvé « chaussure à mon pied » ! Une dernière mauvaise expérience m'a fait comprendre qu'« on est jamais mieux servi que par soi-même », l'hébergement du projet se fera donc chez moi, dès que j'aurai acquis le minimum d'expérience que cela nécessite, au détriment de ma connexion Internet personnelle.
The only hope I see at this stage is if the Debian team decides to join forces with Alain. (Unless some other new translators appear, which seems unlikely.) Even then, I'm not sure if there will be enough translators. But anyway, I'd like to urge both parties to try and find a way that they can work together using common infrastructure. But if that is done, could it please be in a way that allows contribututions from new translators (if they should appear) from other distributions (e.g., Fedora, Ubuntu, or Mandriva).
The Debian team is always ready to join forces. The "fork" mentioned by Alain was motivated by a disagreement we had in the past about the tools to use to achieve the translation work.
We feel that manpages translation is much more efficient, particularly as *team* work (where the load can be shared) when gettext files are used.
This is why the po4a tool was developed in the past, by Martin Quinson (member, at that time, of the Debian l10n French team). That tool has been used since then for more and more manpages i18n for Debians-pecific tools (dpkg, aptitude, etc.)
IIRC, we proposed Alain, in the past, to use po4a to build PO files for the French translation Of the Linux manpages, which would allow us to share the work.
IIRC (again...please correct me if I'm wrong), Alain preferred using the methods he always used for French translations (which I understand quite well as changing tools is not always easy to consider when one is used to a work method).
So, as of now, the French translation of manpages done in Debian is done with PO files, then the files are regenerated *and the changes are sent to Alain* by Nicolas François who is currently doing the huge work of recollecting all this.
So, I see quite unfair to talk about a fork while we are still doing some push of our translation updates back to Alain (through Nicolas François) and are still committed to do this.
Actually, I think we all should discuss about what would be the best way to progress when it comes at Linux manpages and the huge work represented by their i18n and then l10n. We have nearly everything needed for that, indeed:
- an active upstream (you, Michael) - a motivated translator who wants to see the huge work he did put in this not being wasted and vanish (Alain...) - technically-skilled people to help setting up a good i18n infrastructure for these manpages (Nicolas François, maintainer of po4a) - maybe even the Debian i18n infrastructure. We now have a "nearly in production" Pootle server, which we would be delighted to "offer" as localization infrastructure for the Linux manpages (/me, Debian i18n team "leader" along with other Debian i18n server admins).
I understand that, doing so, we're pushing towards the adoption of gettext as preferred format for Linux manpages i18n/l10n....and this might hurt some people who are doing that work manually or semi-manually for years. But, really, after an itial adaptation time, that's worth considering it. If some of you have the chance of running Debian or Ubuntu, just try looking at the dpkg manpages...:-)
For Alain, that may sound like beating an old horse as we had such discussion a few years ago, already. However, maybe are we more ready now than we were at that time. It's worth considering this, IMHO.