man-pages-fr-2.74.0 est sorti

Back in June 2005, a few months after I became the man-pages maintainer, Alain Portal took over the French translation, which had long been maintained by Christophe Blaess (author of Programmation Système en C sous Linux, a nice book on Linux system programming). At that time, the current French translation (1.58) was trailing the English original (2.03) by about 16 releases, and Alain was determined to catch up by creating one-to-one releases for each of the original English release tarballs. I tried to dissuade him from that course, arguing that it might be less work to simply jump forward to translating the current English version. Luckily, he did not listen to me. He proceeded with his plan, creating French translations that corresponded exactly with the original English releases. Along the way he reported countless formatting and wording errors, and many confused pieces of text in the original English pages, which I then corrected upstream.

87 releases later, Alain has caught up with the current English release: yesterday man-pages-fr-2.74.0 was released, and can be downloaded from the usual location. It's a wonderful achievement, and incredibly valuable for francophones all over the world -- thanks Alain!