debian-reference (Version 2 series)

2023-12-18T05:44:43+00:00

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:

• https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-reference (BTS)
• https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debian-reference (Package)
• https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ (Latest HTML page)
• https://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#quick-reference (Links on debian.org)

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.

Contributions

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.

Source tree (main salsa repo)

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

• https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-reference

For read-only access:

 $ git clone -o salsa https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-reference.git
 $ git config merge.merge-po-files.driver "./bin/merge-po-files %A %O %B %P"

For read-write access with SSH:

 $ git clone -o salsa git@salsa.debian.org:debian/debian-reference.git
 $ git config merge.merge-po-files.driver "./bin/merge-po-files %A %O %B %P"

Source tree (Debian package)

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.

Source tree (alternative weblate repo)

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

• https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-reference/

The git repo of debian-reference in weblate is:

• https://hosted.weblate.org/git/debian-reference/translations/

This service is good for translation only contributors and their translation can be performed only via the web page GUI interaction without using git etc.

The translation result stays on weblate service and someone needs to merge them to salsa.

Since there is no sanity check of entity etc. on this contribution, the person merging from weblate to salsa should take care sanity check of the content.

The weblate service of debian-reference is currently mainly maintained by xiao sheng wen atzlinux@sina.com.

Updating salsa git repository

Note on updating English contents and build setups

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

If you updated other files, please make sure to update and commit them.

You must make a test build of this source before pushing it to salsa.

If strings in po files needs to be updated together with ones in xml files in rawxml/, please consider to edit and run bin/sedpoxml.

Note on updating translation contents

If you are updating the translation only, please only commit the updated po/*.po to the latest branch after testing its sanity. I mean no commit of po/debian-reference.pot, *.xml, and *.ent files by the translation focused users.

In other word, please don't use "git commit -a".

It is highly desirable to make a sanity check of translation PO files before committing the translation.

Of course, the best practice is to make a test build of this source before committing the translation.

Git operations for translation updates

Please note that the merging of PO files are non-trivial task which sometimes doesn't work easily with the git merging infrastructure.

If you want to work on your current local branch latest without pushing to the remote server, please fetch the remote branch origin/latest and rebase your local branch latest to origin/latest to maintain the clean commit history.

Let's assume you are updating "fr":

 $ git checkout latest
 $ make wrap LANGPO=fr; make po  LANGPO=fr  # check fuzzy.log
  ... hack-hack-hack
 $ make wrap LANGPO=fr; make po  LANGPO=fr  # check fuzzy.log
 $ make check LANGPO=fr
  ... check sanity of PO file (optional)
 $ make test LANGPO=fr
  ... check build/ for good HTML build
 $ git add po/fr.po
 $ git commit po/fr.po -m "PO: <fr updates"
 $ git remote update origin # get origin/latest
 $ gitk --all               # check no remote updates
 $ git push origin latest

Here, make check is an optional step. This can help to identify the error location in the PO file easier than tracing errors in the test HTML build. If you intentionally add supplemental contents with extra XML tags, you can add a translator comment "skip-tag-match" for each such PO entry.

If merging is more complicated, you can create a local topic branch and work. You can use such a topic branch as a remote backup, too.

Cherry-picking via gitk --all GUI is quite useful to resolve conflicts.

git ime (after installing imediff package may be useful splitting complicated commits.

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.

Editor operations for translation updates

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.

The use of the dedicated PO file editor helps translator to find missing and fuzzy translation data.

Work with 2 remote services salsa and weblate

This is a bit complicated since data on 2 remote services salsa and weblate may be altered simultaneously.

You need to merge data on 2 remote services and your local changes and update them with merged results.

For this, bin/merge-po-files is used to give best merge result now.

Please make sure to update your local repository by running the following:

(The proposed merge script seems to be non-functional at this moment)

Whenever you merge, it is best to run make po and commit updated po files just after the merge.

Debugging PO file contents

Broken build problems for translation are non-trivial to debug by reading the build log or tracing the intermediary files. I made bin/xmlpo script to check sanity of PO files.

This not only finds invalid XML but also find unmatched XML tags which may be caused by careless unfuzzy.

 $ bin/xmlpo -i po4a/po/ja.po
E: line=3087 **UNMATCHED XML TAG: fuzzy=False tags_msgid=Counter({'ulink': 33}) tags_msgstr=Counter({'ulink': 32})
E: line=3349 **UNMATCHED XML TAG: fuzzy=False tags_msgid=Counter({'emphasis': 1}) tags_msgstr=Counter()
E: line=3368 **UNMATCHED XML TAG: fuzzy=False tags_msgid=Counter({'emphasis': 4, 'ulink': 1}) tags_msgstr=Counter({'emphasis': 3, 'ulink': 1})
E: line=6869 **UNMATCHED XML TAG: fuzzy=False tags_msgid=Counter({'literal': 3}) tags_msgstr=Counter({'literal': 2})
E: line=7377 **UNMATCHED XML TAG: fuzzy=False tags_msgid=Counter({'literal': 3}) tags_msgstr=Counter({'literal': 2})
...
ERROR COUNT = 43

Set up a local git repo with remotes salsa and weblate

 $ git clone -o salsa git@salsa.debian.org:debian/debian-reference.git
 $ cd debian-reference
 $ git remote add weblate https://hosted.weblate.org/git/debian-reference/translations/
 $ git remote update weblate
 $ git config merge.merge-po-files.driver "./bin/merge-po-files %A %O %B %P"

There are three branches now:

• latest is local branch which uses salsa's latest as upstream
• salsa/latest is remote tracking branch for salsa's latest
• weblate/latest is remote tracking branch for weblate's latest

Set up CLI cli for weblate service

Install CLI:

$ sudo apt install wlc

Register account in weblate and get your API key from:

• https://hosted.weblate.org/accounts/profile/#api

Put your API key in your personal weblate conf file: ~/.config/weblate

[keys]
https://hosted.weblate.org/api/ = ***your API key strings***

Check and update weblate

Let's check weblate's situation.

 $ wlc repo
needs_commit: True
needs_merge: False
needs_push: False
url: https://hosted.weblate.org/api/projects/debian-reference/repository/

If you see needs_commit: True, execute following to update weblate git repo from translators current works:

 $ wlc commit

Then, you should see:

 $ wlc repo
needs_commit: False
needs_merge: False
needs_push: False
url: https://hosted.weblate.org/api/projects/debian-reference/repository/

You can get the latest committed git repo contents on weblate as follows:

 $ git remote update weblate

Check and update salsa

You can get the latest committed git repo contents on salsa as follows:

 $ git remote update salsa

Merge simple

When weblate is a linear decedent of salsa and your unpublished local branch is a linear decedent of the latest salsa, it's a good idea to rebase your unpublished local branch to weblate.

Let's first verify our situation as:

 $ git checkout latest
 $ git remote update
 $ gitk --all

If the relationship of branches is as expected, let's rebase:

 $ git rebase -i weblate/latest
 ... resolve conflicts

If source tree situation is in good shape after build test, let's push it to salsa and update weblate by the updated salsa using wlc:

 $ git push
 $ wlc pull

If wlc pull experience time-out (30s?), try wlc pull again.

Merge complication

When weblate is not a linear decedent of salsa and your unpublished local branch is a linear decedent of the latest salsa, it's a good idea to merge weblate and salsa first.

 $ git checkout latest
 $ git tag local-latest
 $ git reset --hard salsa/latest
 $ git clean -d -f -x
 $ git rebase -i weblate/latest
 ... resolve conflicts

If source tree situation is in good shape after build test, let's push it to salsa and update weblate by the updated salsa using wlc:

 $ git push
 $ wlc pull

If wlc pull experience time-out (30s?), try wlc pull again.

Then merge the old local-latest.

 $ git reset --hard local-latest
 $ git clean -d -f -x
 $ git rebase -i weblate/latest
 ... resolve conflicts

If source tree situation is in good shape after build test, let's push it to salsa and update weblate by the updated salsa using wlc:

 $ git push
 $ wlc pull

Translation tips

Sanity check of a PO file:

If you wish to check only "ja", you can try following:

 $ make LANGPO=ja check

Look for:

• po file syntax
  • unquoted "
  • accidental folding of lines (missing trailing ")
• URL style
  • % in URL string (use unescaped UTF-8 characters, instead)

This check is very useful for identifying the exact root cause of build failures.

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

This repository now uses very smart 3-way merge for PO files.

Just add a branch for contributed PO branching off from its origin. Then run:

 $ git checkout latest
 $ git merge new-branch
  ... resolve conflict and commit
 $ make po
 $ git commit -a -m "make po"

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

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 dctrl-tools 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.

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%C3%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.

Don't translate the string marked up with <literal>....</literal>

You may see string such as <literal>foo</literal>. If foo in your language means bar, please translate this as: <literal>foo</literal> (bar). This is because foo here is a literal string matching the string in the configuration file.

Hint for debugging PO file.

If "make test LANGPO=your_language" fails while processing PO file but it is not obvious where is the sorce of problem from he error message, execute "make wrap LANGPO=your_language". Then you may get better error message to identify the source of problem.

If the above works and "make test LANGPO=" to build English HTML works without problemi, then try "make test LANGPO=your_language". If it fails while making translated XML file, you have a bit more complicated problem. You may see "Error 255" message like:

 $ make test LANGPO=de
...
No candidate position for the addendum /home/osamu/salsa/debian-reference/debian-reference/po-tmp/de.add.
Addendum po-tmp/de.add does NOT apply to debian-reference.de.xml (translation discarded).
make: *** [Makefile:462: xml] Error 255

(Mostlikely, your debian-reference.de.xml is much smaller than debian-reference.en.xml.)

If this happens, remove offending po/*.add file and build the source again.

Then you see different error message.

 $ make test LANGPO=de
...
mkdir -p /home/osamu/salsa/debian-reference/debian-reference/build
xsltproc --novalid --nonet --xinclude   --stringparam base.dir /home/osamu/salsa/debian-reference/debian-reference/build/ \
                --stringparam html.ext .de.html \
                xslt/style-html.xsl debian-reference.de.xml
debian-reference.de.xml:1940: parser error : Premature end of data in tag section line 1917
        
        ^
unable to parse debian-reference.de.xml
make: *** [Makefile:495: /home/osamu/salsa/debian-reference/debian-reference/build/index.de.html] Error 6

This means:

• debian-reference.de.xml has 1940 lines and stopped due to error.
• Some error happened somewhere between 1917 and 1940 in debian-reference.de.xml
• Look for matching content of line near 1917 and 1940 in po/de.po
• Error is most likely, missing <placeholder type=\"footnote\" id=\"0\"/> etc.

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                               |
        |         |                                               |
        +<--------+                                               |
        |                                                         |
        v                                                         |
        +---------------------------+                             |
        |                           |                             |
        v                           v                             |
        debian-reference.en.xmlt    debian-reference.en.xml       |
        |                   (**)    |                  |          |
        v                           |                  |          |
        po/templates.pot (old)      |                  |          |
        po/ja.po (old)              |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
  [po4a with po4a.cfg]              |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        po/templates.pot (new)      |                  |          |
        po/ja.po (new)              |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        | (debian-reference.ja.xmlt)|                  |          |
        |  ^^unsed data generated^^ |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
  [cp -r po po-tmp]                 |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        po-tml/templates.pot        |                  |          |
        po-tmp/ja.po                |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        |                           |                  |          |
        v                           |                  |          |
  [po4a with po4a-tmp.cfg] <--------+                  |          |
        |                                              |          |
        |                                              |          |
        debian-reference.ja.xml  generated             |          |
        | (fuzzy.log)  (++)                            |          |
        |                                              |          |
        v                                              v          v
        +----------------------------------------------+----------+
        |(make all), (make test),
        |(make html), (make txt), (make pdf), ...
        v
      all documents (*.*.html *.*.txt *.*.pdf)
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Actual build process builds po4a.cfg and po4a-tmp.cfg from po4a.cfg.in and po4a-tmp.cfg.in to reduce workload by limitting run for active translations. Language listed in Makefile can be added whenever any translator feels needed. But adding languages to debian/rules and debian/control needs to be discussed with the Debian packaging owner.

Chinese translation uses OpenCC where cp -r ... is used.

# 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:

• https://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#quick-reference

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.

• https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/cron
  • parts/1ftpfiles
  • parts/7doc

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