[XBoard-devel] Re: Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of XBoard/WinBoard

[Leonardo Boiko]

Ops, it seems I sent this message to the wrong list (I hadn't noticed
the creation of xboard-devel :) ).  Here's the forward.

--
Hello all.  I am Leonardo Boiko, a CS student at the Federal
University of Parana (UFPR), Brazil.  I'm a member of the new chessd
team[1].  We took over the old, abandoned "lasker" code.

Like the old team, our plan is to polish the current chessd a little
and then work in a new server, with a proper protocol and separation
from policy and mechanism.  We already squashed countless bugs, but
there's still work to do.  Once we think it is reasonably stable, the
old "lasker" (now called "joao_vi") will go into maintenance mode while
we design the new server, hopefully with help from the Internet chess
community.

Our project is part of a larger government-funded initiative called
"Chess In Schools", which aims to install electronic chess in _every_
Brazilian public school.  One of the implications is that the new
server will have educational features.  Another is that we need a full
Brazilian Portuguese environment.

We won't add any new features to "joao_vi" except the two we already
did: a proper (automake) compilation scheme and internationalization.
It turns out we can't fully localize it, or we'll break compatibility
with chess clients.  We opted for preserving the strings used by
{X,Win}Board (as described in ICS-parsing.txt), because the large
majority of our users are Windows/WinBoard users.

For the same reason, we need a localized version of WinBoard, and we
need it quickly.

I'm the i18n guy for the project, I'm familiar with gettext and I
consider myself to be a pretty competent Unix/C developer, so I am
responsible for this task.  There's a problem, though; I have not used
Windows for years and have no idea about how to program on that OS.
I'm experimenting a bit with Visual C++ and I already managed to run
gettext, although I'm not really sure about what's the best way of
doing "/usr/share/locale" and "$LC_ALL" in Windows.

Anyway, we plan to have a prototype internationalized WinBoard as soon
as the next week (even if not of perfect quality).  If it can help, I
registered myself at savannah as "leoboiko".  I'll send the patches as
soon as I have something.

References:
[1] http://sf.net/projects/chessd
--
Leonardo Boiko @
the chessd team