Re: Re: Sqwebmail roadmap

On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 09:47:26PM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> 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.

(A) would be a one-off hit, and I don't think would take long. I wouldn't
actually mind doing that part; it's the incorporation of gettext into the
source which would take a lot of learning (for me).

The huge win would be that there would no longer be a need for separate
html/<lang> directories, just a single html/ set of templates.

The only things I can think of which need to remain language-dependent are
FOOTER and ISPELLDICT; the former can look for FOOTER.<lang> and the latter
just needs a mapping table.

I don't know how gettext works, but sqwebmail, as a persistent daemon,
should be able to read the language files into RAM at startup - then the
HTML generation should be no less efficient than it is now.

Cheers,

Brian.