Re: Sqwebmail roadmap

Reinke Bonte writes:

> On Mon, 19 Apr 2004 18:51:54 -0400
> Sam Varshavchik <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> gettext is fine, except that it does not fit in sqwebmail's model,
>> where all language-dependent strings are already externalized into
>> separate files.
> 
> That is not true, Sam, language-dependent strings are intermingled in
> HTML-files. This is a very big difference compared to programs that use
> gettext for internationalization. When a new version of sqwebmail comes
> out, the translation process starts almost from zero again, because I
> need to copy and paste the old strings from the old HTML-templates to
> the new HTML-templates. That is a lot of work, I know it, because I have
> just done it. I, as a user, prefer gettext.

The point I was making is that we are not talking about wrapping gettext() 
around literal strings in C code, then feeding it to gettext to generate PO 
templates.  That's not going to work here.

The only way I see to use gettext with sqwebmail is to:

A) Go through all the HTML files, locate all translatable text, and 
demarcate it somehow.

B) Modify sqwebmail's main generation loop to read the translatable text, 
and feed it to gettext.

   Note: special-case the existing [#$ -- #] macros in sqwebmail's template 
   files.

C) Put together a tool that reparses all the translatable strings and places
them into a dummy source file that's fed to gettext in order to generate the 
pot template files.


B and C is not too bad. The killer is A: a lot of manual work.  It might be 
possible to write a once-only tool to automate the demarcation of 
translatable strings in html template files.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQBAhIEux9p3GYHlUOIRAuPtAJwPxz/zyIHZu0zOI+3zbVNHod4v1ACcCrxQ
aPLFOF9UHvKQuRnYIZH4ZyA=
=Aa7F
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----