Re: Sqwebmail roadmap

On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 12:43:11PM +0100, Brian Candler wrote:
> (1) Bite the internationalization bullet
> 
> What I suggest is
> - remove all natural language strings from templates; replace them with
>   placeholders like "#123" which are pointers into a language-specific
>   dictionary file

If you plan to internationalize sqwebmail, you really should consider
using gettext system.

I have taken part in i18n of several open source projects and have taken
the following lesson: whatever home-grown i18n you use, it will fail at
some point, forcing you to do some really nasty kludges or adopting
gettext after all.

It is because i18n is in fact a complicated issue, even though it might
not seem like one at first (think of plural forms, updating
translations, encoding issues, etc...).

I know that gettext seems a bit complicated at first, but it's worth
learning and using, despite all its shortcomings.  Once you get a way to
extract the strings with xgettext, gettext tools will take care of
almost everything else.

regards,

Marcin
-- 
Marcin Owsiany
[email protected]