Handling of frameworks using Qt-based translations

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Tuesday 18 March 2014 14:20:53 Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 2:05 PM, Aurélien Gâteau <agateau at kde.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I started working on how to handle Qt based translations, and make it as
> > simple as possible to work with for framework maintainers as well as
> > framework users.
> > 
> > I picked KBookmarks as my guinea pig and got to the point where
> > kbookmarkdialogtest shows a translated dialog.
> > 
> > Here is how it currently works. All of this is liberally inspired from
> > the way Trojita works:
> > 
> > # String extraction
> > 
> > I created a src/Messages.sh which contains the following:
> > 
> > lupdate -silent -recursive . -ts $podir/tmp.ts
> > lconvert $podir/tmp.ts --sort-contexts --output-format pot -o
> > $podir/kbookmarks5.pot
> > rm $podir/tmp.ts
> > 
> > # String compilation
> > 
> > I modified the toplevel CMakeLists.txt, adding these lines:
> > 
> > if (EXISTS ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/po)
> > 
> >     include(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/QmSupport.cmake)
> >     qm_setup(kbookmarks5 po)
> > 
> > endif()
> > 
> > I created a QmSupport.cmake file, which exposes a qm_setup() function.
> > This function does three things:
> > 1. Create a "qm" target which turns all .po into .qm files.
> > 
> > 2. Call install(FILES...) on the generated qm files, installing them in
> > share/${name}/locale, where ${name} is the firt argument of qm_setup().
> > 
> > 3. Generate a "${name}_translation.h" which contain two inline functions
> > to make it easy to load the translations.
> > Using the translation is then just a matter of including
> > ${name}_translation.h and calling ${name}_installTranslator(). If more
> > control is needed, ${name}_installTranslator() also accepts an optional
> > argument: the language. For even finer control, the .h also contains a
> > ${name}_createTranslator() function, which returns a QTranslator loaded
> > with strings for the right language.
> > 
> > # Questions
> > 
> > Does this approach sounds sane to you?
> > 
> > I think QmSupport.cmake should go to extra-cmake-modules. Any
> > objections?
> > 
> > Right now qm_setup() is very inflexible: it installs files and creates
> > the _translation.h file based on the name argument, meaning in my
> > example it creates share/kbookmarks5/locale/kbookmarks5_*.qm and
> > include/kbookmarks5_translation.h, which contains the functions
> > kbookmarks5_createTranslator and kbookmarks5_installTranslator.
> > 
> > I think we want to be able to customize the install dir of the
> > _translation.h file because some frameworks install header files in a
> > subdir, others do not.
> > 
> > Should we also be able to customize the install data dir for qm files,
> > as well as the prefix of the function names from _translation.h? I am
> > tempted to default to ${PROJECT_NAME} for the prefix of the function
> > names, its lowercase version for the install data dir and add an
> > optional PROJECT_NAME argument to qm_setup(). Opinions?
> > 
> > I am attaching the diff of the current state. I do not intend to commit
> > it as is since po files are not supposed to be in the framework
> > repository, but it should make it easy for you to try it if you are
> > interested.
> > 
> > Aurélien
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Kde-frameworks-devel mailing list
> > Kde-frameworks-devel at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-frameworks-devel
> 
> Hi Aurélien,
> Wouldn't it make sense that the library called the createTranslation
> itself, instead of expecting the application to call it? I can easily see
> applications forgetting it.

Being a developer who never got how the translation system works and considers 
it as black magic: yes that would break if it has to be done by the 
application.

Cheers
Martin
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