[Libreoffice-qa] minutes of in-person ESC call -- thoughts about gettext

[Andras Timar]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:46 PM, Michael Meeks
<michael.meeks at collabora.com> wrote:
> * Move to using gettext natively (Caolan)
>     + .src format not needed much longer
>         + could move to .po files
>         + use the boost / gettext impl' at run-time
>         + compile with gettext.
>         + needs bootstrapping
>     + would we be able to preserve context ? (Caolan)
>         + more context is possible (Andras)
>         + if we moved to _("foo") - would that work ?
>                 + yes.

On the plus side: making translations would be trivial, translators
could test translated LibreOffice without compiling it from source.
Things to consider:
* size -- en-US strings built-in into executables? .mo files will
contain English + translated strings, it doubles the size for
resources.
* what would be gettext domains, how many would we have? Chances are
that we will lose Pootle history
* we need to a script to automatically convert existing translations
without loss of information (especially important for not maintained
languages, we could lose all of their translations otherwise).
* gettext will not work for Mac installer, Windows Installer, Explorer
shell extensions, Basic macros, etc.

Regarding context support, see
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Contexts.html, we
could give so much detailed context (e.g. full "path" to reach the
string on the UI), that KeyID hack would be unnecessary.

Regards,
Andras