Re: My take on Totem and GStreamer

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2003-06-01 klockan 19.35 skrev Ronald Bultje:
> > If totem does display "raw" gstreamer error texts in its dialogs, that's
> > a big problem. Gstreamer didn't support localization last time I had a
> > look, and we don't want unlocalized content in user visible dialogs in
> > GNOME.
> 
> Look, I understand that you guys prefer i18n'ed stuffies all over the
> place,

Well, "prefer" is an understatement, it's an actual requirement.


> but we can't do that between now and june 9th (Gnome-2.4
> deadline).

I certainly understand that and I didn't suggest so. However, while I
don't suspect this is a showstopper for including more gstreamer-based
applications like totem-gst and sound-juicer in GNOME 2.4 (it's not a
regression, the problem has always been there in gstreamer, even though
it may get more exposed with more applications using gstreamer), I do
think that it would be nice with some commitment from the gstreamer side
to get the localization issue sorted out, at least in time for GNOME
2.6.


> The request was to make proper UI error messages, and so we did. Just
> make a nice error dialog in Totem that says display_dialog(_("An error
> occurred: %s"), gstreamer_error);. It won't be 100% localized, but
> there's no way you'll get that anyway. Xine doesn't do that either.

Windows and MacOS certainly do. There's no reason we can't do the same.


> It'll be understandable that something went wrong, and it'll work just
> fine.

The primary purposes of error messages are to inform the user both that
a) something went wrong and b) what went wrong and possibly c) how to
solve the problem, in order to both inform and help the user help
herself.

a) is certainly solvable by the hack suggested above, but neither b) nor
c), which are as important or perhaps even more important than just
vaguely telling that *something* went wrong. So the suggested hack only
solves a small part of the problem.


> On the long run, we will probably i18n'ize GStreamer. Thomas already
> sent an email about it to our developers' list, and it makes sense.
> However, we simply cannot do that in one week.

It certainly isn't doable in one week, but this isn't exactly a new
topic either. The need for gstreamer localization support was discussed
already when GNOME 2.2 was planned, and also at last year's GUADEC,
where there finally were some vague promises in this area. That was over
a year ago. And it still isn't listed in the project plans on
gstreamer.net.

So I'm certainly happy to hear that this is finally on the radar. I also
hope it doesn't just stay like that.


Christian