Desktop Entry Specification

[Joerg Barfurth]

Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 16:33 +1000, Asgeir Frimannsson wrote:

>>So say you're running under Japanese (ja) locale, but do not have the 
>>Japanese language pack installed for myapp. You will still see the 
>>content of the Desktop entry in Japanese, 
> 

> 	So, when I discussed this with Takao before, I was very surprised that
> the fact that you see some Japanese translations in the ja locale when
> you don't have the language pack installed was considered a problem.
> 
> 	i.e. surely the idea of these language packs is to avoid installing
> unwanted translations, rather than a mechanism to disable Japanese
> messages in the ja locale?
> 
> 	If that's the case, the real bug we're trying to fix here is that when
> you don't have the Japanese language pack installed, some extra disk
> space (and memory/CPU when parsing) is used because the .desktop files
> contain Japanese translations.
> 
> 	That puts the problem in some perspective ... for me, at least.
> 

IME the main benefit of language packs is the ability to 
add/update/remove translations after initial release or installation.

Not all localization projects can keep pace with the release schedule of 
the main project and new localizations may not want to wait for the next 
release of the core product in order to ship. This is even more frequent 
when closed-source work is involved. Even if the release schedule is not 
the problem, users are often reluctant to upgrade to newer releases. Why 
should they need to ugrade to get a feature that could be added onto the 
existing working version with minimal risk?

Ciao, Joerg

-- 
Joerg Barfurth              Sun Microsystems - Desktop - Hamburg
 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> using std::disclaimer <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Software Engineer                         joerg.barfurth at sun.com
OpenOffice.org Configuration          http://util.openoffice.org