Translations in upstream kmod

[evelikov]

On the mailing list one of the manpage-l10n developers/maintainers reported a few issues... Although looking around, the initiative seems to suffer from a few issues:

• severely understaffed, sadly
• doesn't track manpage version and thus updates needed
• unclear contribution process
• quite limited kmod translations - german is mostly complete, most other are non-existent

With the recent changes and updates, I'm wondering: Do we want localisation support in kmod itself? If so, which components should be covered - manual pages, tools and/or libkmod.

I would be somewhat tempted at setting up weblate and using that over the ^^ solution. In particular, it has decent integration with Github, is seeing active contributions, contribution process is clear(er) and authorship is dead obvious.

Preferences, suggestions, volunteers?

[hmartink]

Thanks for bringing this up.

Regarding your points:

severely understaffed, sadly

Yes, getting translators is a tough job, especially for man pages, which are often low priority, especially for smaller teams.

doesn't track manpage version and thus updates needed

We use whatever the distributions we track are shipping. There is no need (for us) to track the exact version. When reporting, I only report issues found in "current " distributions, e.g. not Debian Stable. Remember, we are not upstream, but in this way we also cover patches applied by distributions.

unclear contribution process

We do have a CONTRIBUTING.md, but I could add more to the home page, duely noted.

quite limited kmod translations - german is mostly complete, most other are non-existent

I cannot prescribe which topics the translators work on, it's up to them, which project / topic / theme they prefer.

We do not use weblate by design, because many translation teams have experience low quality input. So we prefer to have less translations but hopefully of higher quality.

If you decide to maintain the man page translations, please let me know so we can arrange proper transfer, once you have established the po4a infrastructure.

[evelikov]

Thanks for the offer and background info.

Mind you, this is more of a "pie in the sky" idea and it's up-to Lucas to decide if we'll go ahead.