RFC: KConfig XT (KDE 3.2)

[Ralf Nolden]

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On Sunday 16 March 2003 00:07, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Saturday 15 March 2003 19:32, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> > On Saturday 15 March 2003 16:38, Waldo Bastian wrote:

> Yes, I also don't think that having translations in a config file will make
> it very easy for humans to process the info. With 40 translations it means
> that you have 39 lines of garbage for every line or interest. Probably
> better to keep tranlations in a seperate file, if at all.

The easy way is to not use translations. The nice way is to use translations 
but only hardcode the actual entry in the file dump (see my other mail on 
that) in english. A frontend to process the data though may be able to read 
in the necessary strings from the po file in the given language of the 
application. 

That means, the config->writeComment( i18n("#! foo bar")) call would 
effectively be translated but the writeComment should fall back to english in 
actually writing it. A configuration editor however would have two choices: 
only use the english version in the config file or use the english version 
and apply the translation from the applications's po file for the language 
setting.

I know this sounds a bit weird but maybe the idea becomes useful in some way 
:-)

Ralf

>
> > I still think that the best solution for these and some other config
> > related problems would be to autogenerate the C++ code accessing the
> > configurations from a single meta description of the config options.
> > This would allow to have a single definition of config options and
> > attributes and to have the most efficient way to access these options
> > depending on what happens with the information.
>
> Yes, that's indeed a good idea. I think we can combine things here though,
> we could use an annotated default configuration file (without translations)
> as the single meta description. Or we could use a seperate meta description
> format and generate a default configuration file from that. (In case we
> have info in the meta description that we only need for code generation.)
>
> > Sidenote: We shouldn't forget that providing meta data for config
> > options and also a config file editor would only be relevant to a small
> > fraction of expert users and doesn't relieves us from improving the
> > configuration dialogs and the control center.
>
> No, certainly not. It's just that the KIOSK features are quite popular with
> sysadmins and one of the first questions is usually "where can I find
> documentation about the config options". These people certainly qualify as
> a small fraction of expert users, but are nevertheless a very important
> category IMHO.
>
> Cheers,
> Waldo

- -- 
We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
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Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org
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