[Mailman-Users] UTF8 descriptions

[Mark Sapiro]

Geoff Shang wrote:
>
>Maybe a stupid question, but why not have it utf-8 for all of them?  I 
>mean, isn't that the whole point of unicode, that it just works 
>everywhere?  Or does it need to match the character set of the 
>messages/templates?


Yes, it does need to match the character set of the messages and
templates. It is still us-ascii for English just because of
superstition. The character set for the translations is/was chosen by
the translator, in many cases before unicode/utf-8 became generally
accepted.


>All this has led me to look at I18N, as it's not an area I've looked at 
>before in Mailman.  And I've got a couple of questions:
>
>1.  There's add_language lines for every supported language in 
>Defaults.py, but only languages located in /etc/mailman/<languagecode> are 
>actually available.  Does Mailman check for them here or is there some 
>other Mailman glue that says which languages are actually available for 
>use?


This is all Debian packaging, possibly based on never released upstream
functionality for installing only selected languages.

In standard Mailman 2.1.x, all supported languages are available. The
message catalogs are in
$prefix/messages/<lang-code>/LC-MESSAGES/mailman.(po|mo) and the
templates are in $prefix/templates/<lang-code>/*


>2.  Further to this, I can only find the template files and not the 
>messages file.  Where should these be located on a Debian system?


Look in Defaults.py/mm_cfg.py for MESSAGES_DIR.

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