Re: The internationalization tutorial.

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 09:45 -0500, Paul Elliott wrote:
> I have a number of problems with the internationalization section of
> the tutorial:
> http://www.gtkmm.org/docs/gtkmm-2.4/docs/tutorial/html/ch24.html#sec-internationalization-intro
> 
> It is too cookbook. It tells you what to do but not what you are doing. When
> you run into problems you don't know how to fix it, because you don't know
> what you are doing.

This seems like very valid criticism. Patches to the documentation would
be helpful. In general, I think some of this explanation is missing
because intltool has been rather strange to use, and changing. But maybe
now we know enough to give more explanation.

> 
> For example they tell you to add this code to your configure.ac file:
> 
> IT_PROG_INTLTOOL([0.35.0])
> 
>       GETTEXT_PACKAGE=programname
>       AC_SUBST(GETTEXT_PACKAGE)
>       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED([GETTEXT_PACKAGE], ["$GETTEXT_PACKAGE"], [The domain to use with gettext])
>       AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT
> 
>       PROGRAMNAME_LOCALEDIR=[${datadir}/locale]
>       AC_SUBST(PROGRAMNAME_LOCALEDIR)
> 
> but they do not tell you what this code does! It feels like cargo cult programming.
> 
> It tells you to add these files: intltool-extract.in intltool-merge.in intltool-update.in
> to EXTRA_DIST, but it does not tell you what these files are or where to find them
> or how to create them!
> 
> It does not tell you which steps are unique to gtkmm2 and which steps would
> be required for any program that uses gettext. BTW, what is
> the answer to this? Which of the steps are unique to gtkmm2?
> 
> It tells you to "Add po to the SUBDIRS variable." It there anyway to
> do internationalization without using recursive make?
> 
> In a famous paper: "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"
> http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf Peter Miller argues that
> recursive make should not be used. Is there anyway to do this?
> 
> Is there any other documentation on how to setup internationalization
> using gettext? Thank You.
> 
> 
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-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com