Re: i18n/gettext?

[François Pinard]

[Karl Eichwalder]

> address@hidden (Pavel Janík) writes:

> >    > François Pinard did some prototyping and these bits are still present 
> > in
> >    > po-mode.el coming with GNU gettext.
> >
> > can François prepare some demonstration for us?

> Hello François,

> may I ask you to lend us your hands?  Can you tell us how to start to
> add native language support to Emacs?

I have some amount of thinking and exchanges on that precise topic, which I
would gladly make available to interested people, yet in a raw/rough form
(probably one or two Babyl files).  However, if anyone ask, I'll probably
clean it a little before replying, to protect the innocent! :-)

The PO mode additions in Emacs LISP was to drive some experiments, and my
`xpot' extractor, which knows about Emacs LISP or Emacs LISP compiled (but
not about Mule yet, sadly), allowed me put some numbers on the project at
the time, and measure that this is going to be a major effort, size-wise.

There were a few areas demanding special care.  One is that, given
the structure of LISP itself, the textual domain may have to switch
quickly and often while the code is executing, so provisions should be
constructed to ensure every string belongs to its proper domain.  Another,
quite related to the first, is whether documentation strings need to be
translated or not (I think they should).  A difficult issue came from the
Emacs maintainer at the time (politicians are not allowed to name each
other in their debates :-), who strongly objected that we mark strings
to be translated, so departing from how we do for most other packages.
He rather wanted that we automate decisions much more than we did so far,
and that is what mainly pushed the project into a long sleep, at the time.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard