Re: We need a solution about .po files && UTF-8

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Carlos Perelló Marín <carlos@gnome-db.org> writes:

> An introduction for gnome-hackers readers...
> 
> 
> We have a problem with l10n strings for GNOME 2.0. For all systems with
> glibc < 2.2 the autorecode feature of glibc is not available so all .po
> files should be encoded as UTF-8. We need mantainers opinion about this
> problem because it's a critical bug that needs a fix before GNOME 2.0
> release.
> 
> We have several options:
> 
> 1.- Store all .po files for GNOME 2.0 at cvs.gnome.org as UTF-8
> 2.- Recode all .po files as UTF-8 at distribution time.

GTK+ will continue to use plan 1. here, as it does currently (and GLib
will be switched over to do the same whenever I get a bit of time to
do it.)

Distributing files that are different than that what is in CVS is
(in my opionion) a bad idea ... files in a distributed tarball
should either one of:

 - Source files, identical to what the maintainer uses
 - Files generated from the source files. 

Plus if tarballs are different from what people are installing
from CVS, handling bugs and QA-ing what we release is going to
getharder.

Yes, it's a little more difficult for translators, but there
are several decent solutions (use the conversion scripts,
use a Unicode-capable editor, use a UTF-8 locale with a locale
friendly editor.)

Regards,
                                        Owen