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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: KGeography needs your help
From:       Chusslove Illich <caslav.ilic () gmx ! net>
Date:       2005-08-18 16:53:26
Message-ID: 200508181853.29428.caslav.ilic () gmx ! net
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> [: Nicolas Goutte :]
> Gettext remains the reference implementation, which continues to be
> developed, while KDE's support remains at an old level.
> [...]
> Personally I do not find this situation satisfactory.

I agree.

> I do not tell that everything has to be done now. Even it cannot be
> done now, especially as there would be a need of the Gettext plural
> support in KBabel.

Err, doesn't KBabel support Gettext plurals already? At least when I open a 
PO file with Gettext plurals, it shows plural forms using tabs. Or perhaps 
this feature is still not working well throughout?

> However, even if it cannot be so right now, I feel that the way should
> be prepared and especially avoid to artificially block the path.

Scripting is decoupled from underlying format, and thus doesn't represent a 
stopage of any kind. It is same as context infos currently are in standard 
Gettext: special embedding, using delimiter.  As for this new take on 
plural handling, technically it is again same as contexts and scripting, 
however...

> I do not think that completely freeing programmers from thinking about
> plurals is such a good idea. Less work for the developer could well
> mean more work for the translators. A balance would be better I think.

Here I also see a possible trouble. Currently, if programmer forgets to use 
a plural handling variant of i18n, some of the translation teams is bound 
to make him aware of that. Then, *all* other teams will be forced to 
acknowledge this, for automatic tools will complain if some translator 
just neglects plurals. In this other approach, there would be no such 
forcing measure, now allowing *translators* to forget about plurals :)

Krzysztof did talk about interface spewing warnings to log file when 
translators don't use plurals, but using this as correction tool seems a 
lot more harder than having automatic tools, like check_po_files and such.

There is another point too. It would be nice to settle on Gettext plurals, 
so that translators and translation tools don't have to think about 
particular "dialects" of PO files. (On a side note, why wasn't Gettext's 
plural handling used in the first place, it seems to me there are no 
technical reasons?) The lack of functionality could be supplemented with 
scripting (or, with future extensions to Gettext, hmm...)

Having said that, using Gettext plurals doesn't prevent us from *scripting* 
additional plural forms (or whatever else within plural message). With 
Gettext plurals, the script would simply be attached to the msgstr that 
one gets when number is 99 :) (checking the conditions in KDE's plural 
implementation, that would be the last msgstr for any language.)

> On the other side, I still think that a scripting extension would be
> more useful if it was not something pure KDE-home-brew but something
> that other projects, for example GNOME, could use too. (Think about
> being it a freedesktop.org specification one day.) So this would mean
> supporting Gettext plurals too.

I'd just like to point out again that scripting stuff we've been talking 
about has nothing to do with the plural stuff that we've been talking 
about :) (except for the fact that both require exact same modification to 
programmer's i18n interface). And scripting stuff has nothing to do with 
whether standard Gettext is used or not.

I do agree that a broader support for scripting would be nice, but there 
has to be someone to pave the way (or not pave, likewise :) In KDE we've 
been lucky that existing code and programmers' habits don't have to be 
changed to introduce scripting (or changed very little, depending on what 
form of that KI18n we would settle for). Last time I looked, that wouldn't 
be the case in Gnome. So KDE seems a good start.

-- 
Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)
Serbian KDE translation team

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