Translated manual pages

[Colin Watson]

I recently ported man-db to Automake (using version 1.10). The main
difficulty I encountered was in handling translated manual pages.
Automake only appears to support installing manual pages in
$(mandir)/man%SECTION%. However, this is only appropriate for English
manual pages. Pages in other languages should be installed in
$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/man%SECTION%.

I also had the problem that my section 5 manual pages shouldn't go
through program name transformation, because they describe configuration
files, not programs. I think only sections 1, 6, and 8 should be
transformed.

I eventually worked around this using a stub Makefile.am for each
language which looks like this (for English, LANGUAGE = .):


LANGUAGE = de.UTF-8

man1_MANS = \
        man1/apropos.1 \
        man1/man.1 \
        man1/manpath.1 \
        man1/whatis.1 \
        man1/zsoelim.1
man5_MANS = \
        man5/manpath.5
man8_MANS = \
        man8/accessdb.8 \
        man8/catman.8 \
        man8/mandb.8

include $(top_srcdir)/man/Rules.man


... and the following Rules.man, largely cribbed from mans.am and
adjusted for my needs (the SED_ARGS bit existed beforehand and I could
probably do this better some other way, maybe by making the generated
pages be configure output files instead):


## Copyright (C) 1994, 1995 Graeme Wilford.
## Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2007 Colin Watson.
## Much of the following is based on automake/lib/am/mans.am, which is:
## Copyright (C) 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
##
## This file is part of man-db.
##
## man-db is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
## (at your option) any later version.
##
## man-db is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
## GNU General Public License for more details.
##
## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
## along with man-db; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
## Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA

CLEANFILES = $(man1_MANS) $(man5_MANS) $(man8_MANS)

SED_ARGS = \
        -e 's,%pager%,$(pager),g' \
        -e 's,%troff%,$(troff),g' \
        -e 's,%date%,$(date),g' \
        -e 's,%version%,$(VERSION),g' \
        -e 's,%zsoelim%,$(TRANS_ZSOELIM),g' \
        -e 's,%man%,$(TRANS_MAN),g' \
        -e 's,%mandb%,$(TRANS_MANDB),g' \
        -e 's,%manpath%,$(TRANS_MANPATH),g' \
        -e 's,%catman%,$(TRANS_CATMAN),g' \
        -e 's,%apropos%,$(TRANS_APROPOS),g' \
        -e 's,%whatis%,$(TRANS_WHATIS),g' \
        -e 's,%manconv%,$(TRANS_MANCONV),g' \
        -e 's,%thzsoelim%,$(TRANS_ZSOELIM_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thman%,$(TRANS_MAN_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thmandb%,$(TRANS_MANDB_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thmanpath%,$(TRANS_MANPATH_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thcatman%,$(TRANS_CATMAN_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thapropos%,$(TRANS_APROPOS_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thwhatis%,$(TRANS_WHATIS_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%thmanconv%,$(TRANS_MANCONV_UPPER),g' \
        -e 's,%manpath_config_file%,$(config_file),g'

.man1.1:
        $(MKDIR_P) man1
        sed $(SED_ARGS) $< > $@
.man5.5:
        $(MKDIR_P) man5
        sed $(SED_ARGS) $< > $@
.man8.8:
        $(MKDIR_P) man8
        sed $(SED_ARGS) $< > $@

install-data-local:
        @set -e; \
        for s in 1 5 8; do \
                test -z "$(mandir)" || $(MKDIR_P) 
"$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/man$$s"; \
        done; \
        list='$(man1_MANS) $(man8_MANS)'; \
        for i in $$list; do \
                ext=`echo $$i | sed -e 's/^.*\\.//'`; \
                inst=`echo $$i | sed -e 's/\\.[0-9a-z]*$$//'`; \
                inst=`echo $$inst | sed -e 's/^.*\///'`; \
                inst=`echo $$inst | sed '$(transform)'`.$$ext; \
                echo " $(INSTALL_DATA) '$$i' 
'$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$inst'"; \
                $(INSTALL_DATA) "$$i" "$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$inst"; 
\
        done; \
        list='$(man5_MANS)'; \
        for i in $$list; do \
                echo " $(INSTALL_DATA) '$$i' 
'$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$i'"; \
                $(INSTALL_DATA) "$$i" "$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$i"; \
        done

uninstall-local:
        @list='$(man1_MANS) $(man8_MANS)'; \
        for i in $$list; do \
                ext=`echo $$i | sed -e 's/^.*\\.//'`; \
                inst=`echo $$i | sed -e 's/\\.[0-9a-z]*$$//'`; \
                inst=`echo $$inst | sed -e 's/^.*\///'`; \
                inst=`echo $$inst | sed '$(transform)'`.$$ext; \
                echo " rm -f '$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$inst'"; \
                rm -f "$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$inst"; \
        done; \
        list='$(man5_MANS)'; \
        for i in $$list; do \
                echo " rm -f '$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$i'"; \
                rm -f "$(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/$(LANGUAGE)/$$i"; \
        done

mostlyclean-local:
        -rm -f index.*

dist-hook:
        @list='$(man1_MANS) $(man5_MANS) $(man8_MANS)'; \
        dist_files=`for file in $$list; do \
                        echo $$file | sed 's/\.\([0-9]\)/.man\1/'; \
                    done`; \
        $(MKDIR_P) `echo "$$dist_files" | \
                    sed 's|^|$(distdir)/|;s,/[^/]*$$,,' | \
                    sort -u`; \
        for file in $$dist_files; do \
                test -f $(distdir)/$$file \
                || cp -p $(srcdir)/$$file $(distdir)/$$file \
                || exit 1; \
        done


However, doing all this by hand is clearly suboptimal, and it would be
better if Automake took care of this. Would it be possible to add
support for this in a future version, or am I missing something that
lets me do it already?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden