Documentation for Package Maintainers regarding Translations (was: General Questions about Translations and what a package maintainer has to do)

Marc Haber <[email protected]> Wed, 19 Mar 2025 09:44:47 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.internationalization.general,gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
tl;dr: New Wiki Page https://wiki.debian.org/I18n/ForPackageMaintainers, 
please review

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 12:03:51PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
>Whenever I am angry about something in Debian, I start writing docs. So
>I try this here, but here I don't know enough to be really helpful. I
>hope that this rant will start a positive discussion with actual results
>that I could pour into a Wiki page that might actually help with the
>pain I am feeling, assuming that many other maintainers feel as well.

Sadly, the disusscion didn't really get traction. But there was 
valueable advice given. You can read up about this in the archive, 
beginning with my rant, 
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/03/msg00337.html

I have put my knowledge and the result of this discussion in a wiki 
page, https://wiki.debian.org/I18n/ForPackageMaintainers and have also 
taken the liberty of putting a link in a prominent place of 
https://wiki.debian.org/I18n

I hope this might be helpful to package maintainers in the presence of 
the majority of docs that is mainly targeted at translations.

Sadly, I haven't fond a comfortable solution about handling merge and 
rebase conflicts in POT and PO files. Additionally, I think that the 
widely common practice of creating/updating POT and PO files in the 
debian/rules clean target is somewhere between suboptimal and wrong.

I would like you people, especially you on debian-i18n¹, to review the 
wiki page and give feedback (resp. direct edit the page) to make it the 
authoritative documentation for package maintiners.

Thanks for helping!

Greetings
Marc

¹ I initially left out debian-i18n deliberately because I think that the 
target audience is more on debian-devel, but since there are people who 
think that debian-i18n can help her as well I am Ccing this to 
debian-i18n. Reply-To is set to debian-devel though, feel free to ignore. 
I am reading both lists.