Standard gettext PO format

[Nicolas Goutte]

On Friday 30 December 2005 18:09, Chusslove Illich wrote:
> > [: Nicolas Goutte :]
> > As for an example that a user might use, I can think of the system
> > having not his language installed and that he install it on its own
> > directories.
>
> This would still be possible if Gettext handles language resolution. What
> would not be possible is to have a non-English fallback in that case.
>

> For example: user sets German as his default language (catalogs in system
> dir), but wants to test a bit of Upper Sorbian (catalogs in home dir), so
> he gives KDE_LANG=hsb:de; then, if there is no Upper Sorbian translation
> of a given message, he wouldn't get German translation, but English
> fallback.

Sure but on the other side the translators of the German minority languages 
(especially Low Saxon) had wanted a way to always have German as fallback.

>

> I would argue that this situations is quite rare, and if the user has
> copied something to the correct place in his home dir, it wouldn't be to
> hard for him to do it again for the additional fallback language.

Sure, however why should he use parts of his harddisk quota for something that 
is already on the system.

What I mean is that especially minority languages are something that system 
administrators will not always install on their systems, especially as if in 
the case of KOffice, the languages were discarded from the release.

On the other side, of course, we must put this in relation of the advantage of 
using an official Gettext runtime. So perhaps indeed the priority would mean 
to drop such a support of mixed directories.

> If the
> translation in home dir is complete enough, or the user wants English
> fallback, then there is no problem at all.
>

> >> [: Chusslove Illich :]
> >> There is code in klocale.cpp which handles changes to catalogs inside
> >> KLocale (and is called on startup, before any i18n calls), so I guess I
> >> could read LANGUAGE there and add its contents to catalogs.
> >
> > [: Nicolas Goutte :]
> > I think that we are misunderstanding us about the use of $LANGUAGE.
>
> Could you clarify? I mean this: if we let Gettext handle language
> resolution, and it looks for order of languages in LANGUAGE, it is easy to
> set LANGUAGE from inside KDE to whatever order KDE defines; eg. first
> languages in KDE_LANG, then settings from config (as chosen in Control
> center), then what was in LANGUAGE originally. Or whatever other priority
> we define.

Good, then perhaps the misunderstanding was on my side.

Have a nice day!