Re: Integrate ITS Tool with gettext and Autotools

[Daiki Ueno <ueno gnu org>]

Hello,

Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org> writes:

> > I don't think gettext's XML support will grow to the point where it can
> > handle complex documentation, but this is probably the way forward for
> > simple XML data files.

I plan to include it in the next release of gettext (maybe in December),
and at some point, I will ask maintainers of custom XML formats to
consider installing their rule files in $prefix/share/gettext/its.

For details, see the preliminary documentation available at:
http://du-a.org/~ueno/gettext/doc/gettext_15.html#SEC326

gettext itself will ship some by default:
http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/gettext-tools/its?h=wip/ueno/its2

This is merely for compatibility reasons, and it would be nicer if those
files are maintained in the relevant "upstream" projects.

> To mark XML attributes as translatable, a common thing to do is to
> prefix them with an underscore. Intltool supports that, but not gettext
> AFAIK. If the ITS branch supports that, it would cover lots of simple
> cases.

It sounds to me one step back, since it typically involves unnecessary
intermediate files (*.in, *.in.in, ...) or a special treatment of
underscores in your XML parser.  On the other hand, it can be easily
written as an ITS rule:

  <its:translateRule selector="//*[starts-with(name(.), '_')]" translate="yes"/>

For those curious about the current status, I have created a Fedora Copr
repository, which will be kept updated until it gets merged:
http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/ueno/gettext-its/

Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards,
-- 
Daiki Ueno