use po4a to make all docs translatable on Weblate and others

[eighthave]

This uses po4a to convert Markdown documents into gettext .po files, while adding key metadata and hiding bits that the translators don't need to see.

For the deep dive, see:
https://guardianproject.info/2020/04/23/figuring-out-crowdsourced-translation-of-websites/

fsfe/reuse-website#26

[wetneb]

How do you plan to keep the .pot files in sync with the source markdown? As far as I can tell:

• Either you require people who contribute to this repository to run po4a every time they change things (probably not ideal);
• Or you set up some sort of GitHub action which updates the .pot and commits it to the repository every time the source changes (better);
• Or Weblate itself could re-generate these .pot files by running po4a itself (day dreaming).

[eighthave]

Those first two are options, it really depends on the maintainers of this how they want to do it. You can also do it manually when you deem things ready for translation to avoid automatically sending the churn to Weblate. I haven't used GitHub Actions before, but it sounds like it should work.

[carmenbianca]

Silly question maybe: Is the presence of en.po necessary? The way I see it, no actual translations happen inside of that file.

I occasionally translate for GNOME, which only has translations for en_GB. The en translations just default to the American English used in the source code.

(Of course, the awkward thing about REUSE is that it uses chiefly British English, but uses the American 'license'. But that's an unrelated detail.)

[eighthave]

Good point: I switched the initial translation language to Spanish (es).

[eighthave]

What do you need me to do to get this merged? should I implement the GitHub Actions idea?

[mxmehl]

Thanks for the PR, it's a great tool!

Some questions regarding specialities of the REUSE website.

[mxmehl]

Thanks for the clarifications!

I just ran po4a po/po4a.conf and it creates different .pot files.

For instance, -#, markdown-text is removed many times, and in your version there are still mentions of the Changelog and README file. I could generate this after merging your PR, just want to be on the safe side since my knowledge about PO/PO4A is very limited (yet).

[eighthave]

you need to use the latest release of po4a. Its available in Debian/buster-backports and Debian/testing. Or you can directly install it using Perl methods.

[mxmehl]

Oh thanks, I thought that with Arch I was quite on the edge – this isn't the case here.

May I still ask you to re-run po4a on your side to throw our README and CHANGELOG? But perhaps it would make more sense to do the github-actions thing in the long run.

[eighthave]

done!

[eighthave]

This was approved and I fixed the issue @mxmehl pointed out. How about merging? Then this can be added to https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/fsfe/

[mxmehl]

Sure, looks good. Will merge and take care that the REUSE check looks a bit better :)