[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Request for Clue: i18n of fortune-esque things



On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 12:20:41PM +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 07:57:00PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Joel Baker wrote:
> > 
> > > That's more or less what I was hoping - however, checking
> > > /usr/share/doc/fortune-mod doesn't show any references to 'language', or
> > > any obvious references to i18n or l10n, at least on stable (my chroots are
> > > currently down due to one machine having some severe stability problems).
> > > Is this just a more-recent-than-stable development?
> > Yes. Try testing and for instance fortunes-de which places the German
> > cookies at the right place.
> > 
> 
> That's far from being proper i18n, unless I understand it wrong i18n in 
> fortunes just means placing new dat files under /usr/share/games/fortunes. 
> That does not give any tools at all for translators to _translate_ 
> fortunes, it's esentially a mechanism to show fortunes in different 
> languages with _different_ (and usually localised) content.
> 
> If you want to have a fortune-based mechanism for debian tips you should 
> make sure you can give translators tools to translate the tips in your 
> package and give fortune a way to use the i18n properly. That is gettext, 
> and there is no gettext support in fortune as far as I see it.

I principle, I agree. In practice, I'm likely to take what I can get,
for now, and work on improving the situation in the long-term.

> Otherwise you might get to create tips, have them translated and, in the 
> long run, users will see _outdated_ (or incomplete) tips because there are 
> no proper mechanisms (i.e. msgmerge) for translators to notice you updated 
> the the tips or added new ones.

More likely, "(This tip has not yet been translated) <english text>",
unless theres a very good reason to use the older tip, in which case it
would be tagged as such.

> Just my 2c.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Javi
> 
> PS: I'm not sure how "tip of the day" is handled in KDE (kti) or GNOME 
> (which program handles those?), maybe you could take a look (and talk) with
> the upstream authors to know how are they handled, Gimp and Gnuchas also
> seems to do properly it as far as I see..

Was discussed on -devel a while back; the view was, more or less, that a
fortune-data file was the most portable and straightforward way to deal
with it, for now, and that we can/should integrate it with other things as
folks figure out how.
-- 
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>

Attachment: pgpIBYTsKzHI8.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: