[GRASS5] i18n GRASS mechanism description

[Glynn Clements]

Alex Shevlakov wrote:

> a brief way to create .po and .mo filez:
> 
> [user at host:somedir] xgettext -a *.c -o some_module.po
> 
> This makes a template which must be edited. Unneeded fields are removed,
> those that correspond to translatable strings are translated. Don't
> forget editing the header with encoding entries.
> 
> [user at host:somedir] msgfmt some_module.po -o some_module.mo
> 
> This makes the machine file (.mo). Both files would go to
> grass/locale/your_locale/LC_MESSAGES. That's where the prog will
> look for them.

A couple of notes:

1. The .po files should be committed to CVS, and the .mo files should
be constructed during the build process. It would help to have a
standard format for the make rules, so that gmake5 etc can process
them if necessary.

2. Don't blindly localise every string literal. Anything which might
be read by a program (including users' scripts) should probably remain
untranslated.

> Glynn, I think of the mechanism you mentioned as basis for locale maintainers,
> and it is easy to search for diffs between the templates you created last time
> and now.

So locale maintainers will "poll" the source code for changes? That
certainly keeps things simple for the developers.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>