[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH] Make 'ipa help' localizable.

[Pavel Zuna]

On 02/01/2011 03:08 PM, John Dennis wrote:
> On 02/01/2011 08:16 AM, Pavel Zuna wrote:
>> For a long time, I was trying to find a way to localize python
>> docstrings, that
>> we use to generate the built-in documentation system. Unfortunately,
>> python
>> docstrings aren't meant to be localized and therefore I had to use a
>> dirty
>> trick: setting the __doc__ variable manually to a gettext instance.
>>
>> There is one major disadvantage: tools that generate developer
>> documentation
>> (like epydoc) won't display docstrings set like this.
>>
>> One solution would be to have docstrings twice in each module: once
>> normally and
>> once set using __doc__, but that would be very ugly.
>>
>> This patch doesn't update .po files, because it's already big as it
>> is. They are
>> regenerated automatically anyway.
>>
>> Ticket #179
>>
>> Pavel
>
> Hi Pavel:
>
> I'm not sure this is the right approach. What we really want is to be
> able to extract the docstrings and put them in a pot file. Normally
> xgettext is used to "xtract" translatable strings but I don't think the
> python parser in xgettext is docstring aware (we should probably confirm
> that).
>
> However pygettext in the python-tools package is docstring aware. From
> it's help text:
>
> -D
> --docstrings
> Extract module, class, method, and function docstrings. These do
> not need to be wrapped in _() markers, and in fact cannot be for
> Python to consider them docstrings. (See also the -X option).
>
> So rather than changing all the source code and making it non-standard I
> think we're better off using a more appropriate tool when building the
> pot file.
>
> Use of pygettext is discussed and documented in this Python
> documentation link:
>
> http://docs.python.org/library/gettext.html#internationalizing-your-programs-and-modules
>
>
> You can find an interesting discussion of the docstring extraction issue
> in this thread:
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/i18n-sig/2001-August/001292.html
>
> BTW, Barry Warsaw is the man behind Mailman and is one of the Python
> community luminaries.
>
>

Thanks for the tips! I'll see what I can do.

Pavel