Re: Is there any desire to support languages other than English in zsh?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Tue, Jun 6, 2023 at 8:54 AM Peter Stephenson
<p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > On 06/06/2023 16:20 Agron Selimaj <as9902613@gmail.com> wrote:
> > However, I am not sure the zsh project supports gettext (and POEdit) throughout.
> > So, in order to support localization in general, we first must use gettext everywhere.
> > Is this something this team is willing to do?
>
> This is certainly a useful thing to do, however previous discussions suggest there is
> no one around to do the considerable amount of work that supporting databases on this
> scale would require.

Having previously overseen the gettext-ification of a piece of
software of similar original vintage and complexity, I would say that
supporting the databases is often the least of the issues.  Sentence
structure varies, which requires converting catenated substrings into
snprintf formats or sets of alternatives; pluralization may differ,
requiring 0 / 1 / >1 conditionals even with gettext intervention; etc.
Also, because of the pervasive changes required, we found it necessary
to merge all outstanding code changes and call a halt to other
development until the "l10n" pass was complete, or we couldn't track
deltas accurately (though we were stuck with CVS for version control
at the time).

This is definitely not something we would want to dive into until
after whatever the next zsh release is, is done.