Bug#1009915: sysvinit: Please align with manpages-l10n and afterwards activate man page translations

[Helge Kreutzmann]

Source: sysvinit
Version: 3.03
Severity: wishlist

For better understanding, I provide some background and afterwards my
exact proposal (request).

On myself
=========
I'm maintainer of (amongst others) manpages-l10n (localized man pages)
and offered to continue the German translation for sysvinit upstream.

Background:
===========
Until recently (i.e. before manpges-l10n version 4.13-1 released in 
February) the translations from Sysvinit were shipped, even if Systemd 
had a man page of the same name. This caused user confusion (see 
#1001908) and therefor manpages-l10n (i.e. manpages-de, manpages-fr, 
manpages-pl, ..) now ship the translation of the systemd man pages 
always.

An example for this is shutdown(8).

When resolving this issue, upstream agreed to accept the man page
translations for its man pages, so they are not lost.

I monitored the sourceware repository, but apparently those files did
not appear there, but in github, therefor I could not post an advanced
warning to you, apologizes.

For the benefit of Sysvinit using Debian users, it would be great if
you could enable the translations of the man pages during package
build; if you need any help on this please ask me and I can have a
look. However, this will create file conflicts if systemd ships a man
page of the same name (which is definitly translated into German but
possibly other languages). 

Simply conflicting manpages-de, manpages-pl, ... won't work, as
manpages-l10n ships translations for over 100 upstream projects, so
forcing it out on Systemvinit systems would not be very nice to users
(they e.g. loose all man-pages translations, mutt, groff, ...).

My request:
===========
The only solution I can imagine is the Alternatives system, so we
identify which man pages conflict and both manpages-l10n and sysvinit
establish alternatives for those translations. Except for German I
expect little updates for other languages, so this system would be
rather static.

If there are better ways to have both sysvinit and manpages-de
(manpages-es, manpages-fr, ..) on the same system at the same time,
then of course I would prefer this. Otherwise bear with me, as a
package maintainer I haven't used the alternatives system so far.

Once this is in place, you enable the translations in sysvinit
packages and users of sysvinit in other languages can read their
correct man pages again (as they did for the last 25 years in German,
other languages simmilarly).

This bug mainly serves to get the ball rolling before the file
conflicts appear and we can coordinate our uploads and packages. Of
course, we can discuss this off-bug, if you prefer.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.3
  APT prefers stable-security
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel taint flags: TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to de_DE.UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     debian at helgefjell.de
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
        64bit GNU powered                     gpg signed mail preferred
           Help keep free software "libre": http://www.ffii.de/
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