Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] l10n: Add git-add.txt to localized man pages

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2017 15:05:24 -0700

Jean-Noel Avila <[email-masked]> writes:

> Signed-off-by: Jean-Noel Avila <[email-masked]>
> ---
>  Documentation/po/documentation.fr.po | 1095 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  Documentation/po/documentation.pot   |  787 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  2 files changed, 1882 insertions(+)
>  create mode 100644 Documentation/po/documentation.fr.po
>  create mode 100644 Documentation/po/documentation.pot

This sounds more like

Subject: l10n: add fr localization for git-add manual pages

to me.  The actual part of this patch that adds "git-add" is the
addition of Documentation/po/documentation.pot, and from that point
of view, this patch may want to be further split into two.

But more importantly, aren't we essentially adding an equivalent of

	cd Documentation && cat git-*.txt

to our codebase?

Surely we cannot avoid having a copy of all messages that are to be
translated using msgid/msgstr based approach, and we already do so
for end-user-facing in-program strings, but it just feels a bit too
much having to carry a duplicate (and slightly a stale) copy of the
entire documentation set around.  For N languages, we'll have an
equivalent for N copies of the English text, in addition to the
translated documentation.

I am wondering if Documentation/po part should be a separate
repository, with a dedicated i18n/l10n coordinator.  Would it make
it easier for (1) those who write code and doc without knowing other
languages, (2) those who update .pot and coordinate the l10n effort
for the documentation and (3) those who translate them if we keep
them in a single repository?