po4a, including the new
po4a-build script, has been released and po4a (0.37.0-1) has been uploaded to Debian. This release also includes a fully updated Spanish translation, including the new po4a-build documentation, thanks to Omar Campagne.
po4a-build will be used as a build-dependency by
emdebian-rootfs and
svn-buildpackage (both due to have updated releases in a couple of days). (po4a-build itself was developed and tested within these packages - as 'genmanpages'.)
po4a-build is intended to make it as easy to produce translated documentation as it can be to produce the current untranslated content.
When po4a prepares the translated content as POD or DocBook XML, the final documentation can then be built using po4a-build. Both the untranslated and translated content is built as a single process, updating the POT files at the same time.
Existing build instructions are replaced by a single call to po4a-build and a simple configuration file is used to tell po4a-build how to build each element and which binary packages will include the translated and untranslated content.
See
po4a-build (1) and
po4a-build.conf (5) from the installed po4a package.
Feel free to try it out with any package that builds translated documentation, *especially* if it also builds binary gettext translations of program output without using autotools, e.g. perl scripts using $(MAKE) but not ./configure.
This should be a useful step in encouraging more packages to translate their script output and manpages. It is trivial to add translation to packages using the full autotools|intltool setup, now po4a-build brings the same level of ease to packages only using $(MAKE). (If someone wants to investigate how CMake can do the same, let me know.)
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/po4a/
http://alioth.debian.org/frs/download.php/3183/po4a-v0.37.0.tar.gz
http://freshmeat.net/projects/po4a/releases
(0.37.0 announcement pending approval by FM)
