[Tutor] gettext mystery

[Michael Lange]

Hi,

I've been playing a ittle with the gettext module, trying to add a german translation to
Moleskine; from reading the docs I thought all I would have to do was creating a mo file
and then adding the magic lines

import gettext
gettext.install('moleskine', '/usr/share/locale')

to the main program file.

I found that Moleskine's author had already tried to implement gettext support, but has given
up for some reason, so I added these lines in the module where he had started
(in site-packages/Moleskine/__init__.py); the result:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/moleskine", line 41, in ?
    import Moleskine
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/Moleskine/__init__.py", line 29, in ?
    gettext.install(domain, locale_dir)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'install'

I changed the second line and wrote:

import gettext
print dir(gettext)

and here's what I get:

[pingu at localhost pingu]$ moleskine
['Catalog', '_', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '_aliases', '_cat', '_cats', '_expand_lang', '_intToLsbStr', '_lsbStrToInt', '_msbStrToInt', '_unalias_lang', 'bindtextdomain', 'dgettext', 'env', 'error', 'gettext', 'lang', 'localedir', 'os', 'prefix', 'string', 'test', 'textdomain']

Then I tried putting the gettext import into the main file (/usr/bin/moleskine) instead of __init__.py and the print
statement gave me the expected output:

[pingu at localhost pingu]$ moleskine
['Catalog', 'ENOENT', 'GNUTranslations', 'NullTranslations', '__all__', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '_current_domain', '_default_localedir', '_expand_lang', '_localedirs', '_translations', 'bindtextdomain', 'dgettext', 'find', 'gettext', 'install', 'os', 'struct', 'sys', 'textdomain', 'translation']

Does anyone have a clue why gettext shows a different behavior depending on where it's imported?
I *think* it might have something to do with GNOME (some menu items are already translated although there
is no german mo file, can GNOME do so automagically?) but it looks like in fact I've been importing
two different modules, which I found quite confusing.

Any pointers are appreciated.

Thanks

Michael