Re: Debian menu system update

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 08:54:51AM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 12:42:23PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> > 
> > What more do you want the Debian menu system to do ?
> 
> Provide an example?  I would like to see how you generate a fully
> localized .desktop file containing all translations.

As mentioned, i18n support is under way. It works, but is not 
straightforward to use.

To answer your question, what you can do with the current menu 
packages:

1) provides translations in the menu-section.mo file for the titles.

At this point you have two solutions
2.1) The simplest but not the best: generate localized .desktop files
for your language.  Add repeat_lang="LOCALE" in your
/etc/menu-method/menu.h

 From menu manual:
  6.3. The install-menu config script definitions
     `repeat_lang=""'
          If set to "LOCALE", then menu will automatically translate all
          title's to the languages specified by the current LC_LOCALE
          setting.  (LC_ALL, ...).  It is intended to expand this to
          `repeat_lang="en:es:eo:nl"', which would repeatedly run
          install-menus for the various specified languages.  But the
          latter hasn't yet been implemented.

2.2) Better but need to change /etc/menu-method/xxx.

  From the menu manual 
6.5. Variables and functions in the install-menu scripts

  forall($array, "var", $exec)
     For each element of the column separated array $array, set
     $var to that element, and print $exec.
     Example:
      forall("eo:nl", "lang", " name[" $lang "]=\"" translate($lang, title()) "\"\n")
     will print:
      name[eo]="Mi estas titolo"
      name[nl]="Ik ben een titel"

All this was implemented by Joost Witteveen, but was never really used.
New menu use repeat_lang to provide translations of menu section,
but there are already the problem of charset support in window manager.
I think it should be fixed first.

There are two important problems to solve before going further:

1) How the translation teams want to handle translations of menu
entries. I never got any answer on this topic (see
<20021003121434.GA2694@blaise.ens-lyon.fr> in debian-l10n-french).

2) How to use translation available in .desktop files. 
To do that we will provide a tool to extract the translations from
.desktop and write them in a format suitable for menu.

I hope it answers your questions.

Cheers,
Bill
--
<ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.