[Libreoffice] l10ntools clean-up?

[Michael Stahl]

On 01/02/12 10:55, Andras Timar wrote:
> Hi Stephan,
> 
> 2012/2/1 Stephan Bergmann <sbergman at redhat.com>:
>>
>> Unless there's someone who screams "but all this should go away in the next
>> couple months, anyway!" I would therefore go ahead and clean that code up,
>> ridding it of any tools dependencies (should hopefully not be too difficult
>> to base it either on sal or even on the plain C++ standard library).
> 
> No, I'm against rewriting them from scratch, because I fear the
> regressions, so I don't think they should go away. I support your idea
> of refactoring.

actually regressions should be easy to prevent here: just build 2 full
trees with all options, e.g. enable all extensions, help, all languages;
then diff the files produced by the tools.

>> An alternative might be to re-write those programs in Python (seeing that
>> there is already one other Python script, po2lo; re-writing in Perl would
>> *not* be an option, Perl not being a language to write programs in in the
>> first place).  However, given the nature of those tools' work, regressions
>> might be hard to spot, so I would like to keep modifications to the code in
>> bounds.
>>
> The nature of these tools, i.e. they manipulate text files, may make
> someone think that it would be a good job for a high level scripting
> language, but considering the performance and stability of the build,
> I would like to keep the current C++ tools, too. I prefer evolution
> over revolution. :)

it may well be the case that a from-scratch rewrite takes less time and
results in a faster program than refactoring the existing C++ code with
its decades worth of cruft.  but that is of course pure speculation :)