podebconf-display-po - display content of a PO file in a debconf interface

         Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>

                                                   2020-12-30                            PODEBCONF-DISPLAY-PO(1)

       •   As  podebconf-display-po  relies on "debconf" to display questions, your environment must be setup to
           display localized questions in the language of the PO file.  If you want to check  a  translation  in
           another language, you need to temporarily change your settings, e.g.

             $ LANGUAGE=de podebconf-display-po de.po

           If  the PO file cannot be converted into your current encoding, English strings are displayed instead
           of the localized ones.  You then have to switch to a UTF-8 environment to prevent encoding mismatch.

       •   Prior to 0.8.3, "po-debconf" did only insert the field name in PO files.   But  some  discussions  on
           mailing-lists showed that text format does depend on template type, e.g. string and boolean types are
           different  because  the former is an open question and user has to enter some text input, whereas the
           latter is basically a Yes/No question.  Authors have to think about it when writing  their  templates
           files, but translators also have to be aware.

           This  is achieved when PO files are generated by po-debconf >= 0.8.3, template type is inserted in PO
           files.  With older versions, podebconf-display-po has  a  trivial  algorithm  to  determine  original
           template type, and may sometimes be wrong.

       •   The "dialog" frontend, when based upon "whiptail", traps system signals and thus podebconf-display-po
           cannot be interrupted by "Ctrl-C" when using this frontend.

       As with any other localization work, translators should test their translations by running the program
       they are working on.  But this is a very hard job with complicated configuration scripts because there is
       no automatic way to have all messages displayed.

       The podebconf-display-po program could be called the PoorManLocalizationChecker for debconf.  It
       parses a PO file, tries to guess what the original templates file did look like, and displays messages in
       a debconf interface.

       Of course being root is not mandatory, and there is no interaction between podebconf-display-po and
       system-wide debconf settings.

       podebconf-display-po - display content of a PO file in a debconf interface

-h, --help
           Display a usage summary and exit.

       -f, --frontend=FRONTEND
           Select an alternate debconf frontend.

debconf(1)

podebconf-display-po [-h] [-fFRONTEND] file.po