Re: Re: Sqwebmail roadmap

On Apr 21, 2004, at 07:45, Marcin Owsiany wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 08:54:07PM -0500, James A Baker wrote:
>> Heck... I'm not sure precisely "how" without looking around... but 
>> it's
>> entirely possible we could load up those strings in the sqwebmail
>> daemon and keep them in memory someway or another to avoid the extra
>> read every time.
>
> Looks like you're reinventing gettext :-)
>
> Marcin

Well, if you say. But the strings are already loaded into memory, I 
just meant it might be possible to hold them across sessions rather 
than loading them per request, as I believe is done currently.

Like I said, I know nothing about gettext, other than what its general 
purpose is. I've never worked with it before, I'm sorry to say.

All I was saying was that it would be simple (i.e. requiring only 
minimally intrusive coding changes) to make sqwebmail read its existing 
string defs from a single file rather than all the HTML files it reads 
from now. (And possibly to keep them in memory between requests.) -- 
Whereas, I didn't know anything about how to add gettext functionality 
to sqwebmail, nor how much additional code it would require being added 
and/or replaced. ... Plus the fact that I probably can't invest the 
time to _find_out_ how much effort / code / time it would require in 
the first place. ;-)

I'm certainly not advocating a home-grown approach *in favor of* 
gettext by any means. Just that if no one is ready to put forth the 
effort to implement gettext, then I could probably invest the time to 
at least refactor the code to read all the strings from a single file. 
-- Which, while not a real solution, might at least simplify the 
translators' workload somewhat.

However, if people _are_ willing to do whatever amount of work is 
required to implement gettext... then more power to them! I certainly 
would love to see a robust, well-designed, and popular i18n system used 
in place of the current home-grown system. -- Absolutely no derision of 
Sam intended at all, but it's not the best method for sure. =)

If some of you guys who actually know gettext already can get this 
done, then by all means please do so! But if it drags out interminably, 
or it's going to be a lot of work to which people can't commit 
themselves... then let me know, and I'll try out the quick "slight 
improvement" instead of the gettext "solution".

-jab