Localized Documentation (manpages)

1

Is there support for non-English manpages currently in NixOS?

I had a brief look around the git repo but didn’t spot anything, I’m just wondering if I missed them.

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2

Pretty sure there is no such thing. The project is still fairly young and focused on developer-users.

I guess it is a sign of rising relevance if people start wondering about i18n/l11n.

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@fricklerhandwerk My humblest apologies for the delayed reply, I don’t seem to have got a notification of your response.

Thanks for responding, that makes perfect sense to me.

I can imagine it not being an issue for a while. I’m probably atypical because my use-case is that I’m learning a language, and wanted to immerse myself in that language as fully as possible - localized manpages are a great source of terminology for me.

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Completely off-topic @philipstears: You’d want to make sure you are “Watching” a topic you’d want to get notifications for. Currently it seems the default for a topic you’ve raised / replied to is “Tracking”. You can change this default at the settings.

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@dramforever hope you don’t mind being tagged randomly but how do you handle this for mostly Chinese speaking audience?

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<Has there been any news during this time? I am interested in the manual in Spanish

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No, there still are not nearly enough contributors to warrant maintaining our manuals in two separate languages and I doubt it’ll happen any time soon. I don’t know of any FOSS projects our size that have a similarly sized body of documentation that is translated.

Your best bet are automated translation tools or, even better, learning the de-facto standard language of the international world.

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The translation itself is much less of a problem than adding the required infrastructure to the code.

Internationalisation is important, and “just learn English” or “just use ML” is not an option for everyone. Learning has significant cost, and ML systems are inaccessible in some countries.

I’d be happy to merge PRs to Nix that build up the required tooling. Eventually we’d need to onboard maintainers for translations though.

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