Translation problems; possible solution

Christian Stimming stimming at tuhh.de
Thu Oct 23 11:49:12 CDT 2003


A. Alper ATICI schrieb:
>><rant>Do people actually *read* my posting?
> 
> Yes, I read it, actually I'm aware of the part in gettext manual 

ok, ok. As an additional problem the mailing list server seems to delay 
some messages, so there is some overlap between when a message is sent 
and when it is read. This might cause some more confusion. I'm sorry.

As for the facts:

> "One basic rule has to be applied all the time:
> A mangled msgid must not have empty msgstr in any PO file."
> 
> This rule simply prevents the mangled string from being printed ever, 
> 
>>First of all, it is not tolerable to drop support for a "C" locale.
>>People have to be able to get meaningful string messages even if they
>>don't have any gettext installed and/or set up correctly.
> 
> All of the non-english-speaking users have to have gettext installed to
> get meaningful messages, so why is that not a problem?

This is true to non-english-speaking users. But for the english speaking 
users (and developers), it is still possible to run gnucash without 
gettext installed at all. And the majority of the developers here agree 
that this possibility should still be left open. I agree with you that 
technically speaking it would very well work to have *everyone* use 
gettext. But all I'm saying is that the gnucash developers' consensus is 
that this is not an option (according to earlier discussions here). 
Therefore any solution to this issue *must* work even if there is no 
gettext available.

And by the way *if* msgid's are extended to make them unambiguous, then 
the mangling extension should be added as a *prefix*. That way, the 
de-mangling could simply be done by shifting the char* pointer, and no 
extra string copying is needed. (This has been discussed in length in 
the gnome-i18n emails I referred to.)

Christian



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