[please follow-up to debian-doc]
Well, I guess this has been already discussed several times.
Anyway, I think it's a very important issue. I'm not sending to -devel
and -policy (for awhile) only because the flame level there is too high.
We already have some packages of translated manpages, e.g.,
manpages-{de,fr,es,it,ja}. The problem is that manpages of sections 1 and
8 should be distributed with its corresponding programs.
It may be interesting to check bug #23522 ("man-db installs foreign
language manpages"), and Fabrizio Pollaco's response arguing that
this is not a bug. He even says that he'd submit a bug report if he found
that some package didn't include the corresponding translated manpages
(when these are known to exist, of course).
Clearly, many people don't want hundreds of foreign language manpages
installed. But unfortunately our installation system doesn't handle
thinks like "profiles" or "environment variables", which could be used to
tell each installation script which language(s) will be used on the
system. Hopefully, this kind of thing will be included in dpkgV2, or at
least in some mass-installation system (there has been much discussion
about that; I really don't know if there's any working implementation).
Anyway, as Thiago Jung Bauermann pointed out in debian-user-portuguese,
the potfiles (which contain the translations of gettext message
catalogs) are already included in many packages, and take at least as much
space as manpages.
So, if Debian is really to be international, right now the only way to go
is to include translated manpages in its corresponding packages, without
asking.
My (unofficial) proposal is roughly: if there are translated manpages for
a package, and a developer sends them to the mantainer, he must include
them in the package.
bye
Rafael Caetano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
