discovery: debian menu already supports l10n!

[Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>]

Well, I just thought I'd pass this along.  I've been playing around
with the Debian menu system, after some complaints on the -gtk-gnome
list that Debian menus don't support localization.  To my suprise, the
Debian menu system *can* support l10n!  It's a little ugly, and could
use improvement, but it works.

For testing, I used gnome-panel, which has internal support for l10n
(systems that don't support l10n themselves won't be able to take
advantage of this).  I modified the menu-method as follows:

  *** /etc/menu-methods/gnome-panel~	Thu Nov  4 20:19:06 1999
  --- /etc/menu-methods/gnome-panel	Fri Dec  3 17:21:41 1999
  ***************
  *** 3,8 ****
  --- 3,11 ----
    
    !include menu.h
    
  + function Title_ES()=ifnempty($title_es,"Name[es]=" $title_es "\n")
  + 
    function findicon($filename)= \
	   ifelsefile($filename, $filename, \
	    iffile("/usr/X11R6/include/X11/pixmaps/" $filename, \
  ***************
  *** 11,16 ****
  --- 14,20 ----
    function AppEntry($var)= \
	   "[Desktop Entry]\n" \
	    "Name=" title() "\n" \
  +         Title_ES() \
	    "Comment=" ifelse($longtitle,$longtitle,$title) "\n" \
	   "Exec=" $command "\n" \
	    $var  \

Note that I didn't have to modify the menu system itself; just the
menu-method for the gnome panel.  Next, I created a menu file with a
title_es field for testing:

  thrak# cat /etc/menu/sunclock 
  ?package(sunclock):needs=X11 section=Apps/Tools hints="Clocks"\
    title="SunClock" longtitle="Sun Clock: Show illuminated portion of Earth" \
    title_es="Clock del Sol" \
    command="/usr/X11R6/bin/sunclock"

(Pardon my lack of knowledge of Spanish -- this was just an experiment.)

Finally, I ran update-menus, and checked the gnome-panel Debian menus
in /var/lib/gnome/Debian, and the entry for SunClock.desktop had:

  [Desktop Entry]
  Name=SunClock
  Name[es]=Clock del Sol
  Comment=Sun Clock: Show illuminated portion of Earth
  Exec=/usr/X11R6/bin/sunclock
  Terminal=false
  Type=Application

So, there you have it.  So, now the question becomes, do we want to
try to take advantage of this?  Only a few menu systems actually
support l10n at this point, but one of them is Gnome, which is pretty
visible.  I think it might be worth going forward somehow.

(Note for followups: I'm not subscribed to debian-devel.)

cheers
-- 
Chris Waters   xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
      or    xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr     | this .signature file.