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debian-reference (Version 2 series)

2021-01-09T23:42:39 JST

Osamu Aoki,

This Debian Reference (v2) is intended to provide a broad overview of the Debian system as a post-installation user's guide. It covers many aspects of system administration through shell-command examples for non-developers.

Package status

The package status of debian-reference can be checked at the following URLs:

Bug report

For bug report, please use the reportbug command against the debian-reference source package.

 $ reportbug --src debian-reference

For bug reports, it is strongly recommended to write what you want explicitly as an alternative. "It does not work...", "I can do this...", etc. aren't very useful. Bug report such as "The section 9.3.3 should be rewritten as .... because .... " is desirable style. (I do not wish to spend time to second-guess or search where you see the issues.)

For simple grammar errors and spell errors, diff -u against the plain text file or the source file are most appreciated. (Of course, real patch files or merge requests are even better.)

See also, http://bugs.debian.org for how Debian BTS works.

Source tree

Please check following web page and download the source tree using the git command from salsa.debian.org.

For read-only access:

 $ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-reference.git

For read-write access with SSH:

 $ git clone git@salsa.debian.org:debian/debian-reference.git

The latest released source package can be downloaded by:

$ apt-get source debian-reference

Here, deb-src line in /etc/apt/sources.list file should be pointing to unstable.

If you have a concrete update proposal, patch files posted to the Debian BTS or merge requests for your proposal are highly appreciated.

You are welcomed to join the maintenance team and update the source tree.

For the English portion and the build scripts, please contact us with your intended action at the Debian documentation project debian-doc@lists.debian.org or file bug fix patches to the Debian BTS before committing the changes to minimize major breakage.

For translation via PO files, it is nice if you check their correctness before committing the changes. In practice, I have been quite permissive for the translation updates and have fixed them manually if I find problems later.

All Debian Developers (DD) have the write access with the "Master" status for this debian-reference salsa repository. If you are a non-Debian Developer with *-guest account on salsa who needs write access to this debian-reference salsa repository, you can inform your *-guest account to me (or any DD) with clear intent and reasonable rationale and let me (or any DD) invite you to the write access with the "Developer" status from the main debian-reference project page via Setting-Member menu.

See https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa/Doc for how to use this site.

Updating the repository

For English, please make sure to update xml files in rawxml/ and commit it.

If you are updating the translation only, please only commit the updated po/*.po to the latest branch. I mean no commit of po/templates.pot, *.xml, and *.ent files. In other word, please don't use "git commit -a". Please note that the merging of PO files are non-trivial task which doesn't work easily with the git merging infrastructure. This is safely realized by creating a local branch and work in the branch. Then commit only a non-conflicting changes to the remote latest branch.

If you are not familiar with git, it may be a good idea to submit your updated po/*.po to the BTS. Then the package maintainer can merge and update the source.

If you wish to push your work-in-progress local branch to the remote server as a private backup, please use the branch name such as wip-foo-guest if your account name is foo-guest. Others are expected not to use such branches and you are recommended to remove them later.

 $ git checkout latest
 $ git checkout -b wip-foo-guest
 $ make wrap;make po        # check fuzzy.log
  ... hack-hack-hack
 $ git push origin wip-foo-guest # private backup
  ... hack-hack-hack
 $ git checkout latest      # get the latest
 $ git pull origin latest
 $ gitk -a po/<language>.po # verify no recent commit on po/<language>.po
 $ git checkout wip-foo-guest po/<language>.po
 $ make wrap;make po        # check fuzzy.log
 $ git add po/<language>.po
 $ git commit -m "Describe commit ..."
 $ git push origin :wip-foo-guest

You can avoid using local branch as above if you use git stash and git stash pop.

Any missing PO strings of zh-tw/zh-cn are temporarily auto-converted from the existing zh-cn/zh-tw PO strings during the build time using opencc. So you may find non-optimal translation strings not-found in the source tree to show up in the generated document. I chose this build setting since non-optimal strings are better than the original English ones for most Chinese readers. You can have the correct translation strings by adding proper PO strings.

Due to bugs in the TeX tool chain for the PDF generation, generation of the proper PDF files may be disabled and only the placeholder PDF files may be generated for some locales.

Translation approaches

Translator are encouraged to use the dedicated PO file editors such as poedit, gtranslator, gettext.el (with emacs), and lokalize on the PO files po/*.po after obtaining the source tree with the git command. This manual approach helps debugging of the PO file by locally test building the source tree.

Recently, people also seems to be contributing translation via the weblate service.

(I am not quite sure how and who merge patches from weblate to the source.)

Translation tips

Sanity check of a PO file:

 $ msgcat some.po >/dev/null

-> Look for unquoted " and accidental folding of lines.

Remove duplicate entries in a PO file

 $ mv some.po some.old.po
 $ msguniq some.old.po >some.po

Add a new PO

You can create a new template PO file for a new language and edit it as:

 $ cd po
 $ cp templates.pot ??.po
 $ poedit ??.po

Merge PO files

When 2 person update a PO file, you need to merge them using tools in the gettext package.

You can check if 2 PO files are different using:

 $ msgcat --less-than=2 filename.po.mine filename.po.their

If you have no order of preference:

 $ msgmerge filename.po.mine filename.po.their >filename.po

Look for "#-#-#-#-#" where manual resolution is needed and resolve it via editor.

If your order of preference puts yours over theirs:

 $ msgcat --use-first filename.po.mine filename.po.their >filename.po

Test build tips

Full build

You can test build the whole tree in testing/sid environment as:

 $ sudo apt-get update
 $ sudo apt-get install devscripts grep-dctrl wget git gitk
 $ sudo apt-get build-dep debian-reference
 $ cd /path/to/debian-reference
 $ debuild
  ...

Please note this takes very long time.

It may be wise to create some virtual build environment while avoiding to update your main system.

Partial build after translation

If you just translated a PO file, e.g. po/it.po, please reformat and test it first by generating HTML files only:

 $ make wrap; make po
 $ make test "LANGPO=it"

You have English and Italian HTML files under the build/ directory.

Specifying "LANGPO" variable as above saves build time by skipping other languages.

Partial build after minor English updates

If you just updated minor English typos in rawxml/*_*.rawxml, please test it first by generating HTML files only:

 $ make test "LANGPO="

You have English HTML files under the build/ directory.

If this test causes no error, clean the source tree and commit it with:

 $ make clean
 $ git add rawxml/*_*.rawxml
 $ git commit rawxml -m "Updated ...."
 $ make wrap; make po; make clean
 $ git commit -a -m "make po"

Please note many PO files are changed in the way git doesn't merge cleanly.

Full build after major English updates

For major English updates in rawxml/*_*.rawxml with new URL references or new packages, please distclean and entity first to update the package database.

 $ make distclean
 $ make entity

The rest are the same as the minor English updates.

@-@ in *_*.rawxml

You see quite a bit of @-@ in rawxml/*_*.rawxml and its derivative rawxml/debian-reference.rawxml source. That is placed there when auto-generated data replaces them as entity in the final form (*.xml, *.po, *.html, ...).

For example:

  • @-@foo@-@ is converted to the entity definition &foo;
  • @-@popcon1@-@ is converted to popcon value and URL link of package in column 1.
  • @-@psize1@-@ is converted to size value and URL link of package in column 1.
  • @-@popcon2@-@ is converted to popcon value and URL link of package in column 2.
  • @-@psize2@-@ is converted to size value and URL link of package in column 2.

These are transformed into XML when conversion from rawxml/debian-reference.rawxml to en.xml and en.xmlt happens.

URL in the English source and PO files

When selecting URL in the English source, please make sure to pick an internationalized URL which understands the browser language preferences.

The top entries of PO files contain URLs. If URL is internationalized, such URLs can be kept as in in the PO files. I.e., (msgid == msgstr):

  msgid "https://www.debian.org/"
  msgstr "https://www.debian.org/"

Not use "%" in URL

If URL uses UTF-8 characters, use original ones instead of ones with "%". (If "%" exists in PO file data, it will break the build.) The proper PO file data rule is simpler to explain by an example. For example, French translation for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding can be found at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codage_des_caractères but copying its URL box in the browser yields percent encoded string https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codage_des_caract%C3%A8res.

Best PO file entry format:

Use the UTF-8 character.

  msgid "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding"
  msgstr "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codage_des_caractères"

Acceptable PO file entry format:

Use entity reference.

  msgid "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding"
  msgstr "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codage_de_caract&percnt;C3&percnt;A8res"

Illegal and unacceptable PO file entry format (I.e., Please don't copy-and-paste):

  msgid "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding"
  msgstr "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codage_des_caract%C3%A8res"

Please note most wikipedia pages have link to the translated text at the left of web page.

https://www.urldecoder.io/ can help to transfer the URL to UTF-8 online.

Don't translate wrong part

Do not change "&foo;" in the msgstr of a PO file for translating URL references. Look for the top part of the PO file defining the "foo" entity.

Don't translate the XML tag name itself

You may see XML tags such as <literal> and <ulink url=\"&gnome;\"> in msgid. Don't change them in translation in msgstr.

Flow chart for the building of this documentation

The English source is kept as rawxml/_.rawxml files under rawxml/. The translation source is kept as PO files under po/.

  >>> rawxml/*_*.rawxml                          remotely fetched data files
      $(RAWXML)                                               $(REMOTE_DATA)
      =========                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        |                                                         :
        |                                                         :
      debian-reference.rawxml                                     :
        |                                                         :
        |                                                         :
        +---> pkg.lst -------------------> pkgsize.ent, popcon.ent, common.ent
        |                                                     $(RAWENT)    (+)
        |                                                      ========
        |                                                         |
        +---> $(DRAW)/header.rawxml                               |
        |         |                                               |
        +<--------+                                               |
        |                                                         |
        |                                                         |
        +---------------------------+                             |
        |                           |                             |
        |                           |                             |
        debian-reference.en.xmlt    debian-reference.en.xml       |
        |                   (**)    |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        templates.pot               |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        ja.po                       |                  |          |
        $(PO)                       |                  |          |
        =====                       |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        +---------------------------+                  |          |
        |                                              |          |
        |                                              |          |
        debian-reference.ja.xml                        |          |
        | (fuzzy.log)  (++)                            |          |
        |                                              |          |
        |                                              |          |
        +----------------------------------------------+----------+
        |(make all), (make test),
        |(make html), (make txt), (make pdf), ...
        v
      all documents (*.*.html *.*.txt *.*.pdf)
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
# RAWXML updated with reference to new packages
 $ make entity             # update all RAWENT with REMOTE_DATA (NET)
# RAWXML updated without reference to new packages
 $                         # no action needed
# before PO update for LANGPO=XX
 $ make po LANGPO=XX       # update all PO in sync with RAWXML and RAWENT
# after PO update for LANGPO=XX
 $ make po LANGPO=XX       # normalize PO
# clean source for commit  (except ===== data)
 $ make clean
# clean source for commit  (except ===== and ^^^^^^^ data) (Keep remote data)
 $ make localclean
# clean source including entity (except ===== and ^^^^^^^ data) (Keep remote data)
 $ make entityclean
# build package
 $ make all                # build all documents
# test build English html  (keep REMOTE_DATA)
 $ make en
# test build LANGPO=XX html
 $ make test LANGPO=XX
# no wrap po file for LANGPO=XX
 $ make nowrap LANGPO=XX
# wrap po file for LANGPO=XX
 $ make wrap LANGPO=XX
# replace string with 'sed -f foo' over po file for LANGPO=XX
 $ make replace LANGPO=XX SEDF=foo
  • (+) When the English source changes URL link location or packages mentioned in the package list table, you need to update *.ent files in the source by running "make entity" with remote file access.
  • (**) debian-reference.en.xmlt effectively replaces untranslatable contents in debian-reference.en.xml with "DUMMY" to reduce clutter in PO files.
  • (++) fuzzy.log file contains number of fuzzy translation. If not zero, please manually update PO file contents.

Build failure due to po/*.add

If po/foo.add can't locate a matching string, build fails. Since no debian-reference.foo.xml for the problematic language is build, it's a bit difficult to debug situation. If you face such problem, please rename such po/foo.add to something like po/foo.add-keep, and execute "make LANGPO=foo html" to make debian-reference.foo.xml. Then you can look for the location of interest and make it the matching string. Then rename po/foo.add-keep back to po/foo.add and update the matching string.

It's tricky. (This should be less problematic after recent po4a updates)

Publication to the www.debian.org servers

The contents of debian-reference are published to the www.debian.org servers and they are linked from:

These are generated from the latest released packages by the cron script run on the master www.debian.org server and they are mirrored to all the www.debian.org servers.

Is there easier way to edit XML source

Unfortunately, no.

Reminder

Updating the *.ent files in the source tree require you to install wget and dctrl-tools and run "make entity". This must be done before the source package upload in manual process. This part of code can't be run as a part of automatic package build process since package build should not access remote data by Debian Policy.

Osamu