[XML-SIG] Will gettext do?

Uche Ogbuji uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com
Tue, 30 Jan 2001 16:45:54 -0700


> It's my turn to go to bed now :-) but as a snap answer: the common
> tradition is to have 4Suite.<lang>.po in the source distribution,
> where <lang> is typically fr, de, en (and *not* fr_FR, de_DE, en_US -
> unless the German translation for Germany really differs from the one
> for, say, Austria). With that, it should not be too difficult to
> generate the directories in a loop.

Well, I do know that en_US could differ from en_GR, but probably not so it's 
inconceivable to combine the two.

> Furthermore, I feel that any <package/<lang>/LC_MESSAGES/catalog.po
> approach is bad (even though it's gettext tradition), so I'd promote
> the idea of having <package>.<lang>.mo instead, and keeping the mo
> files all in a single directory. Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether
> gettext.py supports such a scheme - essentially, you need the module
> to tell you what languages to consider in what order, but you may want
> to override the resulting file naming scheme.

Given that I have reasonable dictionary for now, I'll leave it as is, and we 
can go about improving it when we've shaken out all the cases.

> So *if* you can install into <python prefix>/share/locale, that is
> probably best if that also is the platform convention, otherwise, any
> scheme that just works should do - even if it creates many extra
> directories.

I'll investigate <python prefix>/share/locale

For now they,re in each module's directory itself, which is easy to find 
(__file__), and I know can be written to on install.

> I'd support proposals to enhance gettext.py for easier distribution of
> catalogs - in particular on non-Unix platforms, as well as proposals
> to enhance distutils to support message catalogs.

I think I already have the distutils part down.  It generates a "default" po 
in a "generate" phase, and creates and installs the mo in a "build" phase.

See Ft/admin/DistExt.py


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
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