[Mailman-Users] default language and English

[Mark Sapiro]

Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
>
>Thank you! Yes, when I switched the language for subscribers to Polish, I
>got a notice in Polish. I am still trying to see if I can take it a step
>further.
>
>I edited $prefix/mailman/messages/pl/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po and commented
>out line 10230 (msgid "Password // URL" and its Polish translation) and
>altered line 10234 (msgid "%(host)s mailing list memberships reminder"). I
>saved the file and ran sudo /usr/local/bin/python -S
>/usr/local/mailman/cron/mailpasswds however, this appears to have had no
>effect on mailing.


Two things here:

If you 'comment out' or otherwise alter the 'msgid' value, you
guarantee that the message will be rendered in English. This is
because the English Language string is in the actual code and when the
i18n module is called to translate it, it uses the English string to
look up the corresponding 'msgid' and find the translation in the
corresponding 'msgstr'. If it doesn't find an exact match for the
English string in the 'msgid' strings, it can't provide a translation
at all. Thus, unless the hard coded English message in the Mailman
code changes, you can't change 'msgid'.

The other thing is mailman.po is the source. The file that's actually
used is mailman.mo. If you change mailman.po, you have to run msgfmt
to creat a new mailman.mo. You can use the standard GNU msgfmt, but
some mailman.po files have 'errors' it doesn't like so it is safer to
use Mailman's bin/msgfmt.py.

>Mark - I know have no right to ask for any future features but would you
>consider offering future mailman versions more suited for newsletter type
>of things? Maybe a general switch during list creation to distinguish
>between discussion lists (with its own set of settings) and a newsletter
>type of lists where most of the settings are redundant (digets, passwords,
>option pages).

You have as much right as anyone to request features.

We have had discussions which I don't have time to look up right now of
adding a theme concept to list creation. I.e. a 'discussion' theme, an
'announcement' theme, etc. Then you could specify a theme for a list
and it would be set up appropriately.

I'm not sure either where we are with implementation this.

Anyway, see the wiki at <http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Mailman+2.2>
regarding plans and feature requests.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan