lynx-dev Re: Hello/LYNX

[François Pinard]

Webmaster Jim <address@hidden> writes:

> Most of the developers of Lynx only know English, but that hasn't
> stopped us trying to make it available to others.  So far, many messages
> have been translated to French (and more to German).  The French
> translations came from Lynx users in Canada.  I'm hoping for translated
> versions of help pages and other documents (real soon now).

> There is a Free Translation Project that may have volunteers who could
> do this (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard).  Any other help you could
> give would be appreciated.

Hello, people.  I'm not sure to whom I should write exactly, I'm
sorry if I'm writing to too many people.

Let me try to get the `lynx' project moving in the Translation Project
before going to sleep.  A few irregularities in the `lynx' packaging got
me procrastinating until I could find some quiet time for thinking out
the difficulties.  With your help, hopefully, we will smooth these out
progressively, while the wheel acquires speed.

First, I initialised the domain this way:

  <domain>lynx<mailto>address@hidden
   <disclaim><pretest>
   <url>http://www.slcc.edu/lynx/current/lynx2.8.3dev.2.tar.gz
   <url>ftp://lynx.isc.org/current/lynx2.8.3dev.2.tar.gz

presuming that I should send notifications for translated (ready) PO files
to <address@hidden>, without sending the actual contents of PO files,
just the URL in the archive.  I also presumed that the maintainer does want
translation disclaimers for translations.  Correct me where I'm wrong.

We usually publish for translators a precise URL, rather than a directory,
so they could just use batch tools like `wget' to get the distribution,
so I made this correction above.

The version naming scheme is new for the Translation Project.  Did I
send you the information found within:

   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/reply-maintainers.html

The are three schemes for version naming described in there.  If you use any
other scheme, I have to modify many scripts, and we have to prepare for this.
This distribution does not unpack in a directory predictable from the archive
name, the way which is usual for us.  For example, "lynx2.8.3dev.2" unpacks
within "lynx2-8-3".  This also breaks some other scripts.  Would you accept
considering following GNU standards for packaging?  That would be the easiest
for me, but if you do not want to, we might have to work out something.

To get out of all this, I extracted the POT file by hand instead of
automatically, and gave it the name lynx-2.8.3.pot, hoping that you will not
have other later POT files needing to be called that way, because a POT file
with given version numbers can only be uploaded once in the Translation
Project (once the wheel turns, we may change ideas at the very beginning).

The next problem is that the POT file header is quite incorrect: it comes
from a very old version of `xgettext'.  The Translation Project did not
use that format for a long time, it is quite obsolete by now.  Please grab:

   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/gettext-0.10.35.tar.gz

and use this instead of the old "official" release.  I know that a new
release is overdue, but don't kill me, as I'm not the one doing the releases
for this package. :-) Moreover, there is a serious canonicalisation bug in
0.10.35 (the old "official" release is infinitely worse) that the Translation
Project corrects automatically in all POT and PO files it handles.  We have
to find ways to live with the current situation until the next `gettext'.

I reformatted the POT file header by hand, and tried to force submission.
You should have received a notification by now.  Let me check...  Yes,
the POT file is now part of the PO Central Archives.  Wow, 1040 messages
to translate.  This will not be the smallest of our packages :-).

OK.  I'll now inform the national team leaders about the existence of
this new textual domain.  I presume we all agree that the textual domain
is going to be exactly `lynx'.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard