Re: non-utf8 po files breaking the build

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

tis 2002-11-26 klockan 01.24 skrev Keld Jørn Simonsen:
> > > > > I don't think you should do it, it would create some burdens for 
> > > > > translators that are unnecesary.
> > > > 
> > > > Can you explain this in more detail? What specific burdens, and why do
> > > > you think they are unnecessary? Vague comments without rationales don't
> > > > help.
> > > 
> > > I have discussed this earlier.
> > 
> > Ok, I thought you were to bring up some new input on this issue.
> 
> there were new things in it.

Sorry, I didn't notice. What new input did you bring? What potential
drawbacks hasn't been mentioned and discussed already?


> > > One ting is people doing corrections and not observing that the encoding
> > > is UTF-8, and just correcting it in iso-8859-1. I have seen a number
> > > of examples of this in kde, these errors are cumbersome to solve,
> > > and these problems are unnecessary, and a waiste of my time.
> > 
> > These errors will probably always exist, irregardless of what encodings
> > we use. There will always be mistakes. But the tools can check for those
> > errors and they already do (msgfmt certainly does).
> 
> And then people need the new tools. gettext 0.11 is not
> in standard distributions yet.

I don't know what you count as "standard distributions", but for your
information I can tell you that Red Hat has had gettext 0.11 in at least
two major releases, and also Mandrake and SuSE has it.


> > > Another thing is that my tools for translation, sed scripts,
> > > spellcheckers, are based on the encoding I use, and they dont work with
> > > utf-8.
> > 
> > I don't think we should base the future of GNOME internationalization on
> > the bugs that exist in some individual's private scripts. We certainly
> > need to look at a bigger picture than that.
> 
> My scripts do not have specific bugs. I am just saying that I have a
> convenient and productive environment now, and I do not see a need to
> change it. If it works then dont break it. I have other things to do.

As we've already pointed out, you can still use your own tools all you
like. You just need to convert the output, if it isn't UTF-8 already, if
you want to commit it to GNOME CVS.


> > > To me Linux stands for freedom - in the choice of tools to use, and 
> > > I do not see the need to impose use of specific tools when there is no
> > > need to. The gnome cvs system for translated files have worked fine
> > > with different encodings the two years I have used it, so I see no need
> > > to change it.
> > 
> > Then you are most likely not looking closely enough (which might be part
> > of the reason why we have this discussion over and over). The people
> > that do the daily development and work with the GNOME i18n
> > infrastructure encounter problems with non-UTF-8 encodings all the time.
> > The mail that started this thread was just one in the countless examples
> > of that.
>
> Well, I am not as involved as I would like to, but I have done some
> work on gnome i18n infrastructure. I have some more ideas up my sleeve.
> They do not involve forcing everybody to use utf-8. Lets see when I get
> the time to do more things for Gnome i18n.

We are eagerly awaiting your contributions.


> Anyway the problem that started this thread was not a problem anyway,
> as far as I could tell.

If it wasn't a problem, what solution did you propose?


> Eventually I will probably switch to UTF-8 too some day.

Glad to hear that,


Christian