Re: discovery: debian menu already supports l10n!
> 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:
First of all: If you try "LC_ALL=eo update-menus" as root,
you'll see that menu already supports internationalisation, in a
way that doesn't have to disadvantages described below.
Yes, what you tried works. But it has several disadvantages.
The main one being that it's already very difficult to get all
maintainers to include a menu-entry file with *one* language in
them. Imagine what the problem for someone doing the Spanish
translations would be, if s/he had to contact 500 maintainers,
to get all of them to include a spanish translation.
And then, imagine the stress on 500 maintainers, as they don't
just have to include one language, but several. This is what
Debian is rather bad at: inter-maintainer-communication.
So, the system I implemented with menu (a system that already
works, and `works' for all window managers), tries to attac
the problem differently. For each language, we make *one*
file with all needed translations in them. So, a translator
never needs to bug package maintainers to add a translation.
Also, the development itself will be much easier, as a translator
can already see the fruits of his/her work right after the
work is done, and not months (years?) later, when all package
maintainers finally adopted the translations. I'm all for
translations of the menu entries, and would like them to be
available. But if we put the burden on the maintainers of the
individual debian packages, I don't think there will ever
be a uniform set of translations available.
BTW, people have mentioned that we should use the other translation
effords (for enlightenment/KDE, dunno) Of cource this is true,
and translators should/can chose to use as much of those
translations as possible.
The system implemented by me in menu uses the standard locale
functions. So, translators can use all tools already available
for editing those messages files.
Anyway, if anyone wants to translate menus for his/her language,
but doens't know how to, just email me. It isn't difficult
to do (appart from the translating itself), and examples
for Esperanto are available in the menu source.
Thanks,
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