Re: Errors in sysvinit man pages

[Jesse Smith]

Hello Dr. Krutzmann,

Thank you for writing and letting me know about these translation
efforts and the problem reports that have accumulated with regards to
the sysvinit manual pages.

Before I got any further, I would like to confirm that this mailing list
is the ideal place to report issues such as this one. I'm happy to field
questions and bug reports on this list. If any new issues come up in the
future, please share them here.

With regards to the specific issue reports you shared, I want to make
sure I understand the syntax of the report. As I understand it, the
"Issue:" line of each report shows the existing text, followed by an
arrow and then the suggested text. And, in this case, the B<> syntax
indicates the text should be highlighted?

For example, "-Q -> B<-Q>" means the -Q flag should be highlighted or
bolded in the manual page. Is this correct? If I am understanding
properly, then I will update the manual pages and included these changes
in the next version of sysvinit.

Best wishes,
Jesse Smith



> Dear sysvinit maintainer,
> the manpage-l10n project maintains a large number of translations of
> man pages both from a large variety of sources (including sysvinit) as
> well for a large variety of target languages.
>
> During their work translators notice different possible issues in the
> original (english) man pages. Sometimes this is a straightforward
> typo, sometimes a hard to read sentence, sometimes this is a
> convention not held up and sometimes we simply do not understand the
> original.
>
> We use several distributions as sources and update regularly (at
> least every 2 month). This means we are fairly recent (some
> distributions like archlinux also update frequently) but might miss
> the latest upstream version once in a while, so the error might be
> already fixed. We apologize and ask you to close the issue immediately
> if this should be the case, but given the huge volume of projects and
> the very limited number of volunteers we are not able to double check
> each and every issue.
>
> Secondly we translators see the manpages in the neutral po format,
> i.e. converted and harmonized, but not the original source (be it man,
> groff, xml or other). So we cannot provide a true patch (where
> possible), but only an approximation which you need to convert into
> your source format.
>
> Finally the issues I'm reporting have accumulated over time and are
> not always discovered by me, so sometimes my description of the
> problem my be a bit limited - do not hesitate to ask so we can clarify
> them.
>
> I'm now reporting the errors for your project. If future reports
> should use another channel, please let me know.
>
> Man page: shutdown.8
> Issue: fsck → B<fsck>(8)
>
> "Skip fsck on reboot."
> --
> Man page: shutdown.8
> Issue: -h → B<-h>
>
> "Modifier to the -h flag. Halt action is to turn off the power.  Must
> be used with the -h flag."
> --
> Man page: shutdown.8
> Issue: -Q → B<-Q>
>
> "Silence warnings prior to shutting down. Usually shutdown displays
> warnings every 15 minutes and then every minute in the last 10 minutes of the"
> "countdown until I<time> is reached. When -Q is specified shutdown only warns 
> "
> "when the shutdown process actually happens. All other warning intervals are "
> "suppressed."
> --
> Man page: shutdown.8
> Issue: -P and -H → B<-P> and B<-H>
>
> "Halt or power off after shutdown. Usually used with the -P or -H flags, "
> "depending on whether we want to poweroff or simply stop the operating 
> system."
>
> --
> Man page: shutdown.8
> Issue 1: several: -h → B<-h>
> Issue 2: -P → B<-P>
>
> "Modifier to the -h flag.  Halt action is to halt or drop into boot monitor "
> "on systems that support it.  Must be used with the -h flag.  Halting is "
> "often used to run through the shutdown process and leave output on the "
> "screen for debugging purposes. Or when the user wants the OS to stop, but "
> "leave the power on. To power off at the end of the shutdown sequence use the 
> "
> "-P modifier instead."
>