i18n (was: Re: Conclusions and a compact list of requirements for deconf-spec)

[Christian Neumair]

On Sa, 2005-12-10 at 12:44 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> Since my holiday starts, chances are high that I might work on some of
> my idea's. Including deconf-spec and it's futuristic (most of you guys
> call futuristic things "vaporware") implementation.

The whole i18n part of the spec doesn't look very well thought-out. I
doubt it is wise to cross-reference the translated schemas, and even
referencing one for a given key seems to be wrong.

The problem with multiple schemas is that we replicate the structural
information of the schemas file, thus possibly having inconsistencies
among multiple localized variants of the same schema.

I'm convinced that the best method would be to allow all schemas to
specify a particular translation domain, which can then be used by the
implementation to figure out the correct (implementation-dependant)
string. We'd typically use gettext, i.e. the server looks up a
particular string in a particular gettext catalog with a given language.
This implies also must be description getters for particular languages:

GetDescription - in: language (*) - out: long_description, out:
short_description

I don't think it is important to provide a mechanism for listing all
available languages for a particular schema or key, nor to be able to
detect whether a short or long description exists in a particular
locale. After all, these strings are used in GUIs and query utilities
and I don't see any reason to introspect this information. If people
demand for it, we might have to add it later.

(*) (as returned by setlocale (LC_MESSAGES, NULL)). I'm not sure whether
there is a spec describing the valid locales. man setlocale just
mentions a typical form that involves some ISO standards.

-- 
Christian Neumair <chris at gnome-de.org>
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