Re: My mess under international/l10n

[Martin Quinson <mquinson@ens-lyon.fr>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 02:45:16PM +0200, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> * Martin Quinson <mquinson@ens-lyon.fr> [2003-09-09 10:58]:
> > I am really sorry for the mess I introduced in international/l10n yesterday.
> > The goal of the change was to split the translated parts into perfectly
> > translated ones (100%), and underway ones (less than that).
> 
>  Good idea, IMHO.  It is always a good idea to seperate things on which
> no further work is needed from those who don't need further work.
> 
> > Some of you may think that as long as I don't look able to change those
> > pages without introducing bugs, I should only refrain myself to do any
> > change. But I was one of the authors of those pages, so I guess that if I
> > want something to happen, I have to act, and not only open bug reports.
> 
>  Right. And always remember: We are only human. Bugs happen, and they
> are good to learn from.

Thanks for your support.

>  There is just one question still open that I tried to get an answer to:
> What are those lines preceeded with ;;; in the various templ.src files?
> Are they meant as comment (why wasn't wml comment # used, then!), or are
> they meant as something different and should be translated?

;;; is the comment sign for wml. # is the comment sign for perl, and you can
have perl code in wml, but # outside perl sections denotes special commands
like file inclusion, just as in C.

>  Please elaborate, I don't know what to do with the translation without
> knowing this.

Yes, I should not have put those implementation detail explanations in the
file which the translators are supposed to work with, but the whole file
generation in the intl/l10n area is a bit weird, with a post-treatement done
by sed (in script/fix-files.sh), and I wanted to note that fact for the next
wanting to hack on those pages. When I noticed my error, it was too late,
and I didn't want to remove those comments and obscufacing even more the
poor translators. 

I am thinking about a new page generation schema involving only po files so
that the separation between the scripting and the translation become
obvious, but I still need time to think properly about that.

Thanks, Mt.

-- 
Let's call it an accidental feature.  -- Larry Wall