Re: discovery: debian menu already supports l10n!

[Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>]

joost witteveen <joostje@cistron.nl> writes:
[re: creating better gnome menus]
> However, it should be rather easy to add functions
>   title_en()              # returns the english title, whatever the locale
>   translate($lang, $text) #translate $text into $lang (es, eo, ...)
> and then it is possble for gnome menu-method to create just the
> same gnome menufiles as you create.

Ah!  Yes, that should work.

> > We already have people complaining, and asking us to switch to the
> > Gnome menu system because of this problem.  Especially admins with
> > several users.  (Yes, they could run update-menus as user, but that
> > has its own *major* disadvantages.)

> Then why did nobody mention that to me?

Good question.  I guess we all assumed that you knew.  Hey, at least
I finally mentioned *something* to you.  :-)

> Adding those two functions is quite easy for me, and that fixes the
> technical problem.

Yes, I believe you're right.  The approach you suggest hadn't
occurred to me.

One other thing you might want to add is a way to test if a
translation of some text into some language is available.  Something
like:

  iftranslatable($lang, $text, $exec)

I'll leave the details up to you, but something like that could be
useful, and possibly necessary in some cases.

Oh, and maybe some way of querying the current locale would be nice.
Something that returns "es" when you've run "LANG=es update-menus".
Not sure it's necessary, but it might be useful, and it certainly
should be easy to do.

> One other function I would like to add:

>   forall($array,$var,$exec)

Oh yes, yes, yes, I was going to suggest that myself.  :-)

This is all very good, I think we're definitely on track here.

cheers