translation procedures

[Christian Stimming]

Am Sonntag, 4. September 2005 00:19 schrieb Neil Williams:
> > There is only one open question: Which package should have these strings
> > in its .pot file, i.e. in which pot file should the msgids eventually be
> > located? That question is easily answered: If the string will be
> > displayed in the Gnucash GUI, then it *has* to appear in gnucash's own
> > pot file.
>
> Not exclusively the gnucash po file. By calling gettext on the library *as
> it is loaded* by whichever application uses it, the translations from
> gnucash-gui or cashutil are used. It does mean gnucash-gui and cashutil po
> files need to be built from the same source tree.

That's right, I didn't express my self clear enough here.

> > Gnucash has so much more translators and translations than any other
> > involved project. Any translations of strings in Gnucash simply *have* to
> > be located in gnucash's own gnucash.pot.
>
> But CashUtil needs them too. It already has all the QofBackendError
> messages re-formatted for a CLI output (with less \n and a standardised
> "%s:", PACKAGE start to each message).

I meant something differently here: Once we will approach a new stable 
release, then gnucash will announce a "call for translations". We can expect 
about 4-6 different languages and translators that will answer that call 
quickly, who will retrieve the gnucash.pot file and will translate a large 
portion of that. More of the existing gnucash languages will follow in the 
months after that. The point simply is: We have to face the fact that any 
other less-known project like "CashUtil" will never attract that much 
translators. It would be desireable and nice, but it won't be the case. 

But you can profit from this the other way round: CashUtil can simply copy the 
then-existing translations from gnucash into its own po directory, and 
CashUtil will then use those msgids that are also used inside CashUtil. 

But for this you need to ensure that all strings that are relevant to gnucash 
should also appear in the gnucash.pot file. Currently, where the "libqof" and 
the "gnucash file backend" is in the gnucash source tree, this is the current 
status. That status should be kept. If libqof and/or the gnucash-file-backend 
move into some other CVS, we have to come up with other mechanisms to keep 
the translations in the gnucash.pot file, although they won't be used 
directly inside gnucash but be copied to the other projects. But that is not 
a problem today.

> > However, this only means that the msgid somehow
> > have to appear in the gnucash pot file
>
> Easily done now that the strings are in the C files in the one source tree
> that will eventually provide both GnuCash-GUI and CashUtil.

Yes. 

Christian