Anything based on direct changes in English manpages requires a *constant* commitment. Otherwise, I guess that, at some moment, one might have hard times coping back with the upstream changes.
One of the things that Alain has striven to do is a 1-to-1 release for the upstream English version So for each English 2.xy and 3.xy there is a corresponding French n.xy version. At first, I thought Alain was mistaken to do this. But now I see it as a virtue, since:
a) Any distribution can pluck out the French tarball corresponding to the English traball they are also distributing in a particular release. b) Alain in effect is reviewing each of my releases, and providing much useful feedback to me about things to fix.
Of course, this work style could be compatible with the Debian tools, if everyone could agree on that approach.
That would definitely be *still possible*. The additionnal benefit I see is that I think the use of gettext would make missing one or a few releases less difficult to cope with ("moins difficile de rattraper le retard").
at some moment, translators will be again able to cope back with changes and re-update.
As a technical start (mostly for people who are reading this thread and didn't talk yet because they're not on holidays like me....or doing their paid work like you), do you currently work in a VCS system, ie something that could be checked out by a motivated person so that (s)he can propose a patch to switch the manpages build system to po4a?
I use SVN, but that's just for my own bookkeeping. The repository is not public. Sometime in the next few months, I aim to switch to a public git repository.
The VCS itself is not really *that* important. More important is (imho) the fact the the work is done in a public place, to allow someone working on the gettextization infrastructure to first biuld a patch to enable it in the build system....and then keep up with this.
Anyway, I think we should both take care now to....wait for others to speak up:
- I am on holiday with free time and you are (currently) paid for the task so we can both be fairly vocal right now
- I can't speak for all other Debian people. I am in no way their representative even though sometimes people think of /me as is, when it comes at i18n
- Alain is by far the more concerned by all this and we (Michael and I) both have been fairly vocal last 2 days.....we need to leave him some time to read all this and comment (sorry, Alain, I followed up in English even though Michael told me I can continue in French if I prefer but, even though my English is....sometimes clumsy....it is my most often used communcation language when it comes at Debian and related work).