Re: Native Language Support

[Ole Laursen <olau at hardworking dot dk>]

> How and when the FSF potfile should be updated I don't know. Many
> smaller projects have a string freeze some time before the release. With
> the wast amount of strings that are in gcc, that period is probably going
> to be too long for it to work good.

I'd suggest doing more than one update before a release. One well
ahead of the release, perhaps 1-2 months (translation GCC takes
*really* long time), and one closer to, perhaps 1-3 weeks.

However a few in between releases also helps when distributions like
Red Hat package their own release.

> In big projects like nautilus (it has lots of strings) they simply
> view the po files as any other source-file and it's updated against
> cvs. The translators can do a cvs update every week, regenerate the
> pot file themself and update the .po file like any other source
> file. When there are several translators (like nautilus) cvs also
> gives all the usual advantages.

Nautilus is somewhat special, though, in that it resides in the Gnome
CVS. So translators may get access to all Gnome translations at once.
Going through the same hassle for just GCC seems overkill. A review
process is also needed to ensure that the people getting write access
to the CVS aren't maniacs. :-)

Perhaps the GNU Translation Project will switch to a central CVS
solution in the future? Then a few cron jobs would solve this problem.
But that's another story.

> But I've had this discussion before, and it's not a big deal. I will of
> course send in my translation to FSF in the future when that works. But
> for now there is nothing at FSF that is worth translating.

No, not with respect to GCC at least. That is what my original message
(I don't know if you read it) was intended to fix... :-)

> Ooh, me to. I run most of my program localized nowadays. Emacs is not
> translated tough and I guess that is an even bigger problem with all of
> it's lisp-code. But that's another mailinglist that I'm not subscribed to.

Yes. I know Sawfish (the window manager) has solved this problem some
way. I'm thinking about looking into that this summer if I can find
the time.

-- 
Ole Laursen 
http://sunsite.dk/olau/