Internationalisation of bzr cli

[Martin Pool]

On 29 April 2011 06:33, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:
>> I would like to contribute, maybe I could wrap strings in the codebase
>> in the gettext() function. Is there something easy I could start with?
> I think the first step is probably to write up a spec on how to approach
> this without slowing Bazaar down.
>
> Various other people have also expressed interest in i18n'ing the bzr
> UI. I think it would be a great feature to have.

I agree with Jelmer about the traps and that it's probably possible to
do it reasonably fast.

I do think you can take an exploratory approach rather than writing a
spec up front.  Eventually we will need some short documentation on
how we do internationalization, to make sure that all developers
understand how to use it consistently.  But perhaps it would be good
to just trying naively adding gettext support and trying to get just
one command to display output in just one foreign language.  We can
measure whether it is noticeably slower or not, and what problems you
encounter, and then the spec can address those questions.  If you do
try it, even if you don't get it working all the way through, please
tell us what you observe.

Martin