[Merge] lp:~songofacandy/bzr/i18n into lp:bzr

[David Planella]

El dc 11 de 05 de 2011 a les 14:24 +0300, en/na Alexander Belchenko va
escriure:
> Alexander Belchenko пишет:
> > Vincent Ladeuil пишет:
> >> <snip/>
> >>
> >>     > Because _ has special meaning in PDB. Why does it matter?
> 
> I can add even more reasons against using _() in first place.
> 
> Function _() is just alias to some gettext method which is bound to 
> specific language at installing time.
> 
> So the usual practice for GUI applications is to install _() into global 
> namespace leaving gettext to determine what language user wants to see
> and don't care about translations anymore.
> 

Not arguing in favour of any approach here, just a quick note here to
mention that most of the translatable Python apps out there don't use
gettext.install() to install _() into global namespace.

They rather use something along the lines of:

import gettext
gettext.bindtextdomain('myapplication', '/path/to/my/language/directory')
gettext.textdomain('myapplication')
_ = gettext.gettext

# ...
print _('This is a translatable string.')

(Example from the Python gettext docs)

Additionally you can call setlocale to explicitly set the default system
locale. 

> I think this is wrong approach, although it may work OK for many 
> projects out there.
> 
> 1) Function _() translates the strings to some language immediately. 
> That's could not what you want if you don't plan to show all those 
> strings to user from the start. That could be OK for GUI applications, 
> which shows most of their strings as menu/interface to the user. But 
> this is simply the wrong way for CLI like bzr, who wants to achieve 
> speed. Bzr wants to be lazy and don't do extra work until it's really 
> needed.
> 
> 2) Function _() translate the strings to some language immediately.
> That will be VERY bad for tests which check output of bzr commands. 
> Output never will match until you have forced C locale before running tetst.
> 
> 3) For QBzr/Explorer I've implemented support for user-defined language 
> of the UI, it's stored as language option in bazaar.conf. And that's not 
> whim. People asked for this to be able run our GUI in preferred 
> language, maybe because translations could be incomplete. I don't see 
> why CLI bzr won't support the same.
> 
> More guides about proper usage of i18n in QBzr can be found here:
> 
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~qbzr-dev/qbzr/trunk2a/view/head:/docs/gettext_usage.txt
> or
> http://bialix.com/qbzr/docs/gettext_usage.html
> 
> I believe that approach used in QBzr and Explorer (plus nice 
> ZzzTranslations class in explorer) is much more powerful and flexible 
> than trying to use plain _(). I can be wrong of course, and will be 
> happy to hear the contra arguments. But so far I haven't heard them.
> Maybe I'm trying to achieve too much, but in the end I'm not native 
> English speaker and proper i18n/l10n stuff is important for me. So maybe 
> my own standards a bit higher than in the other projects. Please, bear 
> with me.


-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella
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