Re: man page translations

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 02:13:46PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
> In doing this I tried to match standard behavior of other packages as
> much as possible,

I'm all for that!

> so I'm writing here to document what I understand that to be.
>
> The translated man pages are installed by default. They go under paths
> like this:

That concerned me at first because most people will want at most 1 or
2 languages, and we already have 16 with more coming.  But the
instructions later in your email may be the best way for such people
to proceed.

> I think that installing translations by default is standard behavior. I
> have a lot of /usr/share/man/<code> directories on my Debian system.

I have those directories, but even the largest of them is less than
10% the size of my English man pages.

> I was wrong about the --enable-nls=... syntax. To install only a subset
> of the available languages, define the environment variable LINGUAS when
> installing. This matches the behavior for the installation of gettext
> catalogs.
>
> LINGUAS="de es" make install

This sounds like a good way for people who don't want the extra man
pages to deal with it.  As you note, it will help with other packages
and with gettext catalogs too.  If we only want English, I guess we
should just set LINGUAS to "en"?  Setting it empty might work for Nmap
too, but perhaps other packages have a non-English default language?

I welcome more input if anyone has different ideas of how this should
work.  I don't know much about translation standards.

Assuming we settle on this approach (i.e. if nobody proposes something
different), can you document this in the install guide?

Thanks,
Fyodor

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