[GRASS5] another approach to i18n for tcltkgrass; former one revoked

[Russell Nelson]

Alex Shevlakov writes:
 > Have you ever dealt with issues or just theoretizing?

I've compiled code that uses libintl, and modified code that uses
message catalogs, but have never written such code from scratch.  Have 
I ever dealt with issues or am I just theoretizing?

 > It's free software.

But it's not free to install it, and if installing it breaks something 
else, then it is rather expensive software.

 > BTW, it becomes clear if you look at menu.tcl (or any
 > module script), that there is no code in them.

I already looked at menu.tcl and a couple of module scripts.  There's
code in them.  If I wanted to write a more normal gui for grass
(e.g. where the menu was at the top of the window, and what grass
calls a "monitor" was automatically started up), I'd do it in Python,
not Tcl/Tk.  If the translations get written into menu.tcl and the
module tcl code, I would have to extract the translations by parsing
the tcl code from Python.  That's certainly possible, however it
presumes that I either cheat and parse the existing structure for its
messages and that nobody is ever going to change the code in menu.tcl
or the module tcl code.  Or else I have to write a full Tcl
interpreter in Python.

To put it a different way: to my eyes, there's code in those files.
If, on the other hand, you are thinking of them as
data-with-a-particular-syntax-that-matches-tcl-code, then I'm happy
with that.  Perhaps you could document the syntax of those files
apart from whatever documentation may exist for tcl code?

 > These files are 95% messages, English or whatever. One of the
 > reasons why, in this particular case, I chose to have these 212
 > tiny files instead of the one named "ru.msg", is that sum of the
 > disk space occupied would be almost twice lower.

If I was worried about disk space, I wouldn't install GRASS!!

-- 
-russ nelson              http://russnelson.com | Nelson's principle: when
Crynwr sells support for free software  | PGPok | someone proposes a solution,
521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | always ask for a definition
Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  | +1 315 268 9201 FAX   | of the problem it solves.