[aur-dev] Using gettext for translations?

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 10:07:15PM -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 9:27 PM, Lukas Fleischer
> <archlinux at cryptocrack.de> wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 10:26:35PM +0200, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I thought about this sometime ago. The existing i8n files shouldn't be
> >> too hard to convert and we could move translation work to some more
> >> appropriate platform like Transifex which is used by pacman already. PHP
> >> gettext integration doesn't seem to be too bad and our PHP is compiled
> >> with gettext support by default, also.
> >>
> >> Any opinions/objections?
> >
> > Pushed a first draft to my "wip" branch. There still is a bunch of hacky
> > stuff that needs to the reviewed or fixed. This should rather be
> > considered as some code to play around with.
> >
> > Patches welcome.
> 
> Hmm. You're missing like the most important part- how are you
> generating the original message catalog? I came up with this, this
> should be the very first patch as "make catalog" or something:
> $ grep -RFl '__(' web/* | xargs xgettext --default-domain=aur -L php
> --keyword=__
> 
> And then naming this file aur.pot

Yes, this was on my TODO. The problem is that __() currently isn't
gettext-compatible (it's gettext() plus htmlspecialchars() plus some
broken sprintf reimplementation and thus expects more than one parameter
in some cases, when there's formatting sequences). I wasn't sure if
xgettext(1) could handle that but it seems it does. Thanks.

> A much better solution is obviously not to grep, but to put the
> filenames in a POTFILES file (pretty standard convention), and then
> using the --files-from flag. You can also use the --directory=web flag
> to not have to duplicate that in every path specified. Read the
> manpage of xgettext for some other things to consider: c-format
> strings, whether to include line number comments (I'd encourage
> against them as it generates a lot of churn in the files hiding the
> actual changes).

Yes, sounds good.

> Next, I'd recommend setting up some makefile shortcuts for running
> msgmerge to update the translation files from the catalog. Then use
> this to make another checkin of the language-specific po files so they
> are in a more "native" format, with the headers and all that.

Was on my TODO as well.

> Patch notes:
> * A capital gettext domain seems silly and out of character; I'd
> really just think about going with "aur".

Ack.

> * Use --check when calling msgfmt.

Ack.