po files and charset field

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

Since version 2.2 of glibc it seems that automatic on-the-fly charset
conversion is possible, eg you cna have a po (well a mo :) ) file translated
using koi8-r but tell LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 or LC_ALL=ru_RU.CP1251, and
it will convert it and it will work automagically.

But for that the charset used for the translation must be properly told.

For that it is necessary that:
- the header of the po file be correctly written (easy to check, type
  "msgfmt -v -o /dev/null yourfile.po")
- the charset identification you use must be a valid one; it is suggested to
  use the same standard identifications as fro MIME (that is the same as
  used for email, news, web pages, etc).
  In particular, some po editing programs seem to use "ISO 8859-X", please
  change that to "iso-8859-X" (case is not important, but the change of " "
  to an "-" is very important).
  Please take care about that, and correct the configuration of your po editor
  if needed. 

Thank you very much.

PS: What would be the path for strings not in po nor in sgml nor in xml;
namely the ones in *.desktop and *.directory with no charset information
at all ?
Should they be made all utf-8 (I can take the task to convert all those
files if needed), and for which release of Gnome should it be mandatory
that they will be all in utf-8 (with conversion to the real charset asked
by the user trough LC_CTYPE if needed).

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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