Translation Technology

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>     - we discussed two implementation ideas:
>
>         + to teach the customization infrastructure about translations
>
>         + to teach the customization infrastructure to install RPMs
>
>       but no consensus was reached.

I'd suggest a third option:
 + to teach the transaction infrastructure about customization.

That is, we really should have a multi-stage lookup for customization
strings, where gettext first looks somewhere in the user's home
directory for "user" translations, then maybe in a second place for
"country-supplied" translations, then in the system image for
translations distributed with the core build -- and then possibly
further, using a "Quechua" translation if available, otherwise
repeating the process looking for a "Peruvian Spanish" translation,
then a "Generic Spanish" translation before falling back to English.

This naturally encapsulates the user's changes in their home
directory, and provides an easy mechanism (via the shell if nothing
else) for the "big undo" of user-specific customizations.

The customization key infrastructure can easily deal with installing
files in /home/olpc, but I slightly prefer that the result "look like
an Activity" so that we don't have Yet Another Component That Needs An
Independent Updater.
 --scott

-- 
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