RFC: i18n proposal

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 11:26:42PM +0200, Göran Uddeborg wrote: 
> When running things like "rpm -qi" or redhat-config-packages
> 
> 1. When a description, summary, or group is to be displayed, a
>    translation is sought by a call to dgettext() whith a domain name
>    derived from the package being inspected.
> 
> Would this make sense?  Is it approximately along the lines you meant?
> (To the extent you had them thought out.)

Yes, I think so.

> Would it be appropriate to put these package po files in some specific
> hierarchy, separate from /usr/share/locale?  (And do a corresponding
> call to bindtextdomain() before calling dgettext().)

It seems to be just a namespace issue to me; either in
/usr/share/locale with a prefixed name such as rpm- or in a separate
directory both seem fine. Maybe a separate dir is cleaner.

> Is the needed information always available?  Like, does rpm know
> enough in time to find the po files when quering a package file, for
> example?

Don't know.

> How would one handle building single packages, not being part of a
> distribution?  Maybe by having an RPM directive specifying a directory
> in the build tree to search for further message catalogs?  Then the
> translations for this package would be part of the source of the
> package, which I guess would make sense.

A fair question, and I'm not there's an answer. Seems like "if you
rebuild, you lose the translations"

Havoc