RFC: i18n proposal

[Jeff Johnson]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:52:04PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 11:39:47PM +0200, Göran Uddeborg wrote: 
> > The specspo implementation creates one huge database of descriptions
> > for all and only packages of one release.  My intention was to try to
> > envision a scheme, inspired by the ideas in Havoc's letters, where
> > this was split up per package instead.
> 
> Jeff made the point to me in a hallway conversation that a more
> appropriate split might be "per translation team."  At least I think
> he'd agree with that.

Good we appear to be moving to convergence ;-)

If the intent is to have one domain per-package, the current implementation
already supports this. For example, suppose you want a single domain for
package "foo". This is the current process to create:

	a) configure the new translation domain in /etc/rpm/macros.specspo
	(or any of the zillions of places that a macro can be defined)
		%_i18ndomains	redhat:foo

	b) add the msgid text in the usual places within the en_US locale.
	Here's what needs to be there for %description:
		msgid: "foo(Description)"
		msgstr: "This is foo's description."

	c) add the usual PO file in the usual places for domain "foo".
	Here's what needs to be there for the above:
		msgid: "This is foo's description."
		msgstr: "This is the translation of foo's description."

This mechanism is sufficiently general to support thousands of teensy
per-package domains without changing anything.

Any wartlets, like linear search on domains, or abuse of en_US can be easily
solved in the rpm implementation, not the package format, or rpmbuild
process.

Any other solution, like compiling in msgid's into packages again again again,
or adding new-fangled tags, is gonna cause trouble imho.

So what's wrong with the above?

73 de Jeff

-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj at redhat.com (jbj at jbj.org)
Chapel Hill, NC