gnc-glossary.txt proposal

[James LewisMoss]

>>>>> On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 10:49:37 +0300, Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl> said:

 Richard> Hi, I've been working on a translation for nl.  (It's going
 Richard> slowly, so I'm targeting it for the 1.8 release.)  I noticed
 Richard> that I'm not using the gnc-glossary.txt file because its
 Richard> format is awkward.

 Richard> You see, its fields are tab-separated, but the entries vary
 Richard> greatly in width.  This is not so bad yet for the de_DE
 Richard> column, but later columns are not really columns at all
 Richard> anymore.  And the lines become much longer than my window is
 Richard> wide, adding to the confusion :)

 Richard> I propose using a multiline format for the glossary, for
 Richard> example:

 Richard> Term: account Explanation: A detailed record of money spent
 Richard> and received de: Konto nl: rekening

 Richard> Term: account name de: Kontobezeichnung nl: rekeningnaam

 Richard> This is the rfc822 style used in many places by Debian.
 Richard> Each paragraph contains information for one term, and
 Richard> paragraphs are separated by blank lines.  Long fields can be
 Richard> split over multiple lines by using continuation lines that
 Richard> start with whitespace.  Fields with no value can be omitted.

 Richard> An XML format might be better suited for this project,
 Richard> especially if some of the translations will use funky
 Richard> character sets.  But I don't know enough about XML to
 Richard> propose one :-) The rfc822 style could still work if the
 Richard> charset for each language is defined to be the same as is
 Richard> used in its po file.

 Richard> As a side effect, using a multiline format will make it
 Richard> easier to merge conflicts in CVS, because it doesn't involve
 Richard> peering at the diff lines to figure out which columns have
 Richard> changed.

 Richard> What do you think?

Seems reasonable to me.  I just looked at the file for the first time
and was confused.  As to targeting for a 1.8 release just get done
when you can and it'll likely go into a 1.6.x release.

Jim

-- 
@James LewisMoss <dres@debian.org>      |  Blessed Be!
@    http://jimdres.home.mindspring.com |  Linux is kewl!
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