gettext questions

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

I've been looking at Daniel Egger's patch for localization
of GTK+ via gettext recently, and I had a few questions/thoughts.

 * What is the exact situation as to the requirements that this
   puts on the system where GTK+ is being installed?

   In theory, according to ABOUT_NLS, it should automatically 
   get things right:

    - If GNU gettext is installed, use that
    - If catgets() is installed use that
    - Otherwise, use the included gettext.

   However, I still see quite a few messages on gnome-list 
   where people have problems with gettext, and the solutions
   people suggest are often either "install gettext 10.35"
   or, "use --with-included-gettext". Which worries me a bit.

 * One difficulty with internationalization is that sometimes
   special fonts are required to match the localized text.
   
   The solution I am thinking of implementing, is, if the locale is,
   say ja_JP.ujis, then GTK+, upon initialization, will look for,
   in turn:

     $datadir/gtk/gtkrc.ja_JP.ujis
     $datadir/gtk/gtkrc.ja_JP
     $datadir/gtk/gtkrc.ja

   and parse the first one it finds. A set of these files suitable
   for the distributed PO files would be shipped with GTK+.

   (Q: should these be considered data files or configuration
    files? If the latter, we probably should also search
    in some path in the user's home directory, and possibly
    also in etc/)

 * Another thing that has to be concerned is internationalization
   in GtkItemFactory. My proposal for this is to add:

   typedef gchar *(GtkItemTranslationFunc) (const gchar *path);

     gtk_item_factory_set_translation_func (GtkItemFactory *ifactory,
	  				    GtkItemFactoryTranslationFunc func);
   The translation function receives a menu path, say:

     "/File/_Delete"

   and returns the translation of the item. ("_Löschen"). (The
   caller would strip off leading path comments from the return.
   if necesary)

   Comments?

 * In gtkitemfactory.c debugging messages are marked for translation.
   For instance:

      g_warning (_("GtkItemFactory: invalid factory path `%s'"), path);

   I'm not sure this is worth doing. There are a _lot_ of warnings
   in GTK+, which are intended for the programmer, and considering
   that someone programming with GTK+ already needs a bit of knowledge
   of English, translating all the warnings for the programmer
   seems to put an undue burden on the translator.

Regards,
                                        Owen