RFC: i18n proposal

[Göran Uddeborg]

Jeff Johnson writes:
> If the intent is to have one domain per-package, the current implementation
> already supports this.

I start to feel, during this discussion, goal and implementation has
become a bit confused.  I'm surely guilty, starting my posts by an
attempt to suggest an implementation of my interpretation of Havoc's
suggestion.

I'll try to clarify MY goals.

As a RHL user I want

  the description (etc.), including translations, come, change, and go
  with the package.  I don't want them to be modified when a
  different, technically unrelated, package is modified.

  Having one domain per package and including that domain with the
  package, is one way to implement that.  Having all descriptions in
  the meta-data is another way.  There are surely other ways.

As a packager of third party packages I want

  an easy way to maintain the description, and to receive translations
  of it.

  That was why I thought around having rpmbuild pick up translations
  at build time from po-files laying around.  If I also am the author
  of the software I package, it would be convenient to put all
  messages from the program(s) proper and the spec file description in
  one po file and make that available for translation.  (Doing some
  kind of "gettext" on the spec file.)  If I package someone elses
  software, it would be more reasonable to provide a separate po file
  for translators.

  Manually copying translations back and forth between po files and
  spec files is not very convenient, obviously.

As a translator of RHL descriptions (a.k.a. "specspo") I want

  the descriptions be available in a format which is easy to translate
  and maintain.

  The current specspo is fine for this!  (It is huge, and took a long
  time to do.  But that would not have been different with some other
  packaging.)

As a translator of other's third party packages I want

  the same thing as for RHL packages, a convenient format.

  Of course I would expect to get it individually for each package,
  and not collected together with other unrelated packages.  But po
  files are good again.

That's several "I want"s.  I'm not saying one solution should fullfill
all, and I'm not at all saying they MUST be fullfilled before any
other problem.  But if one of them could be fulfilled, it would be
better than none.

> 	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

Do you envisage some way to do this automatically on (un)installation
of packages?  So that each package can carry it's own translations?
Or just a different default value coming with the same specspo package
still carrying all translations?  That's would be important given my
first point above.  And I'm not sure exactly what you are suggesting.