[Texi2html] Re: gettext-like framework for string translations

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 04:31:03PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
>      {'duplicate'=>1} means the the document state
>     should be used when expanding the string.
> 
> Why the name "duplicate", instead of a name such as
> "document_expand"?  Just seems curious.

Because it is developer-centric, it means that duplicate_state should
be called on the main document state to be passed to the formatting
function... Could be easily changed, though.

>     (for the record, I reused the existing translations already in texi2html).
> 
> Is there any possibility of keeping any of the strings from makeinfo?
> If not, life goes on, but it means a whole new job for each and every
> translation.

There aren't that many strings from makeinfo relevant for in document
strings. That being said I guess that msgmerge or similar would 
allow to easily reuse makeinfo strings.

Error messages translations (which I am setting up right now) are a 
different story, for these I use __(, sprintf and %s and also reuse
as much as possible the makeinfo messages (though sometimes I use a
different message when it seems to me to be an improvement). I even plan
to simply copy the makeinfo po files, since there are currently no error 
message translations at all in texi2html.

There shouldn't be real issues license-wise since everything could
be Copyrighted by the FSF, but could it be possible for the FSF to 
agree for a change in license such that translations in texi2html are 
covered by the texi2html license and not the texinfo license?

As a side note, in texinfo, some translation files don't have the license 
sentence (cz, da, de_AT, eo, fr, he, hr, hu, ja, nb, ru, sv, zh_TW)
# This file is distributed under the same license as the texinfo package.

Karl, did you contact the texi2html translation authors for the copyright
transfer to the FSF? Authors of translations prior from 2001 are unknown
(at least to me), I think that we can consider that they are in the public 
domain.

> Since this approach (which I think is great work, FWIW) has quite
> different possibilities than any other package, we'll need to put your
> message into some documentation, so translators have a chance of doing
> the right thing.

If I recall well the previous scheme was documented in the texi2html manual,
but not necessarily well. Indeed my message would be an interesting base for 
this kind of documentation. Putting it in the TODO.

--
Pat