Re: [WIP]: localize guix.texi

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Julien,

Thanks a lot for taking this initiative.  To me localization is super
important if we are to make free software a viable option for everyone.

Julien Lepiller <address@hidden> skribis:

>> here is my first attempt at localizing guix.texi. This patch adds
>> guix.fr.texi, a localized version of the manual. It uses po4a to
>> generate the .po file and use that same file to generate the localized
>> manual.

>From the patch I can’t really see how translation works.  Do translators
get a list of msgids to translate?

>> I had to include the guix.fr.texi in the commit because it is
>> necessary that it exists in order to add it to info_TEXINFOS. This
>> means that this version of guix now requires po4a and will always
>> build the localized manuals in every available language. I don't
>> really like that though.

What about doing what we do for man pages?  We include generated man
pages in the distributed tarball (that’s what the ‘dist_’ prefix in
‘dist_man1_MANS’ means, in doc/local.mk).  Thus help2man is needed only
if you’re building from a checkout.  Furthermore, we use AM_MISSING_PROG
so that users get a helpful message if they end up in a situation where
they would need help2man.

> From 7443ce7407a7194a9d9487f95f940b4b9adf5d82 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Julien Lepiller <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 23:24:30 +0100
> Subject: [PATCH] doc: Allow documentation to be translated.
>
> po/doc/local.mk: New file.
> Makefile.am: Include it.
> doc/local.mk (info_TEXINFOS, BUILT_SOURCES, EXTRA_DIST, MAINTAINERCLEANFILES):
> Add guix.fr.texi
> (rules): New rule to build localized texi files
> .gitignore: Ignore doc/version.*.texi

You’re missing bullets for each item here.  :-)

> +PO4A_PARAMS:=-M UTF-8 -L UTF-8 #master and localized encoding
> +PO4A_PARAMS+=-k 0 # produce an output even if the translation is not complete
> +PO4A_PARAMS+=-f texinfo # texinfo format

Nitpick: leave spaces around assignment operators.

> +$(srcdir)/%D%/guix.%.texi: %D%/guix.texi po/doc/%.po
> +     po4a-translate $(PO4A_PARAMS) -m $< -p $(word 2,$^) -l address@hidden
> +     sed -i 's|guix\.info|guix.fr.info|' address@hidden
> +     mv address@hidden $@

[...]

> +$(srcdir)/po/doc/%.po: doc/guix.texi
> +     po4a-updatepo -M UTF-8 -f texinfo -m $< -p $@

If you use AM_MISSING_PROG, then you can use $(PO4A_TRANSLATE) and
$(PO4A_UPDATEPO) instead of directly using the program names here.

Last thing: please enclose file names in double quotes: "$@", "$<", etc.

With these changes, I’m all for applying the patch to master.

Thank you!

Ludo’.