Re: Internationalization

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

pinard@progiciels-bpi.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> And since Red Gnus is a sizeable package, it would surely throw, as
> an example to all, an heavy pole in the good direction.

And since Gnus is a progressive package, it's a good testing ground
for things like this.  :-)

> And then, just loop on the following two commands:
> 
> 	,	find next candidate for a translatable string
> 	M-,	(conditional) mark it for translation if it makes sense
> 
> until you marked all strings.

I've installed gettext and I've started to create the .po file, but
the one thing that struck me is that by far the most text to be
translated in Gnus is the documentation strings.  And wrapping
documentation strings in the `_' calls will break things.  I also
think that writing (_"This is a string") seems a bit odd.  
#"This is a string" seems like a better idea to me...  or even 
#_"This is a string".  This will require some tiny changes in lread.c,
but nothing major...

> * Step 6.  Either wait until someone develop a patch for GNU Emacs so it
> includes gettext as a new primitive, or else, reimplement it in Emacs LISP.
> The gettext primitive is not ready yet, but I believe it has to be done in
> any case, we cannot really escape it, even if it may take a while.  On the
> other hand, GNU gettext is quite featureful, and it will be relatively
> difficult to reimplement it all in Emacs LISP without forgetting features.

Shouldn't it be rather simple to include the gettext subr in Emacs?
Just link libintl.a in and do the normal Emacs lisp interface thingie?
However, if we want to get this into Emacs, it has to be done
now(ish), or we'll have to wait for a while.  The Emacs 19.34.90 alpha
is being released today, I believe.  

If it's simple to include gettext in Emacs, could you run this by RMS
and see what he thinks about it?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@ifi.uio.no * Lars Ingebrigtsen