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desktop and/or menu files localization (was: Re: adding desktop files to misc packages)



(crossposted to -i18n)

Quoting Josselin Mouette (joss@debian.org):
> Le vendredi 13 juillet 2007 à 17:30 -0400, Joey Hess a écrit :
> > There are probably enhancements that would let it create _better_
> > .desktop files. For example, ones with translations..
> 
> Ah, right. I forgot translations. Another good reason to drop the Debian
> menu system.

Speaking about desktop files l10n, the current way to
translate them does not seem to scale very well to me.

From what I see in the dozens of .desktop files I have on my own
system, I see "Field[code]" fields for translations of "Field". 

This is similar to what we had, in the past, for debconf templates and
we all known this doesn't scale and doesn't handle changes to English
strings very well.

I suppose that big projects like KDE and GNOME have setup their own
l10n infrastructure to localize these, but allowing the same to happen
with other .desktop files would be an interesting enhancement.

The same goes for menu entries.

So whatever choice is Good or Bad, there's an interesting problem to
work on: develop a gettext-based system to translate .desktop or .menu
files.

Indeed, it would be good to have something allowing such strings to go
in a debian/po directory, much similarly to what's currently done with
debconf templates. Then the translated .desktop or menu files would be
built at package build time from the original file and the set of
gettext translations in debian/po

Anyone feeling like digging into this problem?

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