Re: Emacs i18n (was: bug#34520: delete-matching-lines should report how many lines it deleted)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2019 22:04:06 -0500
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
>   (advice-add 'message :around
>               (lambda (orig-fun format-string &rest args)
>                 (apply orig-fun (apply 'i18n-get-translation format-string 
> args) args))
>               '((name . message-i18n)))
> ======================================================================
> 
> It seems pretty good.  When installing it, it should not use
> `advice-add'.  Rather, `message' should call a list of functions.

This has come up several times in the past.  The main problem with
i18n in Emacs is that, unlike in many text-mode programs, 'message'
covers a tiny portion of the Emacs UI.  We have help commands that pop
up buffers; we have commands that prompt in the minibuffer; we have
menu items and labels on tool-bar buttons; we have help-echo on menus,
tool bar, the mode line, and mouse-sensitive text; we have tooltips;
etc. etc.  What's worse, most of the text shown by these features is
computed dynamically by the commands that display the text.

Any reasonably relevant i18n infrastructure for Emacs should address
at least some of the above.  For example, a significant progress could
be made if we had infrastructure for translating doc strings, which
would allow translators to provide message catalogs for individual
Lisp packages.  Past discussions revealed that even this limited
progress is not really trivial.

Unfortunately, past discussions didn't lead to any significant
progress wrt this.  While doing some progress would be welcome, I
suggest that we don't pretend the solution is as easy as advice around
'message', but instead try to attack the more significant parts of the
problem.

Volunteers are welcome.