[XML-SIG] Specializing DOM exceptions

[Martin v. Loewis]

> > I'd like to use gettext if available, so that somebody may actually
> > consider translating the messages - or drop the idea of translating
> > the __str__ representation of a DOM exception.
> 
> I'm unclear here.  Is it really so difficult to add a de_DE.py (or whatever) 
> for translating the error strings?

That's not really difficult - although the tool support for
translating messages from .po files is better than that for .py files.

What *is* difficult is the selection code. For example, I have a LANG
setting of de_DE.UTF-8; I'd still like to get the de_DE
messages. Also, people that use de_AT.ISO-8859-1 still want the de_DE
catalog, since likely nobody will offer one specialized for Austria.

> When I put in the i18n hooks, I thought about gettext, but it's not
> available in a straightforward manner for Windows and some UNIX
> systems.

With Python 2.0, it is available uniformly on every system. On Python
1.5, it would fall back to the English catalog, ie.

try:
  import gettext
  bindtextdomain("pyxml",path-to-catalog)
  def _(msg):
    gettext.dgettext("pyxml",msg)
except ImportError:
  def _(msg):
    return msg

> Also, does distutils provide any support for gettext database
> pre-processing?

Not yet; this is part of the open issue of installing the Tools code
on every system (in this case, of msgfmt.py).

I think it would be possible to introduce another command build_mo or
so. I'll try to have it generate mo files with available tools, and
install the catalog into
_xmlplus/messages/<lang>/LC_MESSAGES/pyxml.po, or <prefix>/share/locale.

Regards,
Martin