[following up on an ooooold message] On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:20:42PM +0200, Joost van Baal wrote: >[Sorry for crosspost, Mail-Followup-To set to >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Ivo Timmermans wrote on >[email protected]: >> Ideally, the Dutch (and other) manpages should be distributed together >> with the upstream sources. Fileutils for example should install its >> translated manpages itself. > >Indeed. I started looking at how to implement such a thing. Currently, >the GNU tools use help2man by Brendan O'Dea to convert the stuff >binaries give when invoked with --help to a manpage. help2man supports >english only; therefore all alternative --help texts, included in .po >files, do _not_ get converted to manpages, and only an english manpage >gets installed. I believe the best thing to do would be to >internationalize help2man. Once that is done, GNU packages could >provide a hook to install manpages in other languages. > >Brendan, do you think it would be a good idea to internationalize >help2man?
Indeed, it is certainly a very good idea and one I've wanted to persue now for some years, although up until recently there's not been a any reasonable way to extract the strings from perl code for translation. Denis Barbier filed a bug a little while ago on help2man with a patch to provide some i18n support for help2man. I've subsequently been able to cruft up a script (using the perl compiler) to produce a .pot file for help2man, and with additional translations/advice/patches from Denis have now released help2man 1.30.1 which includes a --locale option to produce manual pages in any language supported by both the progran and help2man (currently only fr_FR). Enjoy. --bod
