[Etoys] #2133 BLOC Trial-3: Switch etoys to gettext translations

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Sep 17, 2007, at 22:57 , Takashi Yamamiya wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> On Sep 17, 2007, at 22:20 , Takashi Yamamiya wrote:
>>> But what's the point of using in runtime? Maybe I would miss  
>>> something...
>> As I wrote before - so someone can add (and test!) translations  
>> without rebuilding the image. This makes it much easier and more  
>> rewarding to translators.
>> - Bert -
>
> O.K.
> For me, using gettext tool more is more scary than staying Smalltalk
> world, and testing po file is easy enough for user if we provide
> a simple UI (just connecting mime-type for .po with GetTextImporter).

I would just make it as simple as possible for translators. Making  
the process similar to other packages seems like the easiest solution.

> But maybe I need to learn more about gettext tools...

The basic idea is to have the po files separate from the application  
code, no rebuilding is necessary to add translations. The compiled mo  
files are structured for efficient lookup to be performed at runtime.  
We'll have to see how efficient that is compared to an in-image  
solution, but as soon as we have a sufficiently large number of  
languages, the space wasting alone will make this impractical.

- Bert -