Re: mc: new translation

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> 	I've committed mc.hint.zh_TW.Big5 into mc CVS, will that cause any
> problem?

I'm sorry that I'm moving the discussion to the mailing list without your
prior consent.  I believe you would not object if I asked you, but I have
no time to send messages back and forth.

In general, I reserve the right to forward any messages concerning
exclusively software projects to the appropriate mailing lists unless
otherwise requested.  There are several important points to be made in
this message, and I have no time to write the same things privately over
and over again.  It's not a matter between me and you - it's a public
project.

You have indeed caused a problem by adding a space after the backslash in
lib/Makefile.in.  The current CVS version doesn't compile because of that.
I'm committing the fix now.

Internationalization teams are welcome to edit translations to their
languages, but makefiles are not translations.  You should at least test
your changes or, preferrably (and _always_ if you cannot test!), ask the
developers in the list to make those changes for you.

Next thing, also about testing.  Have you been able to make MC show hints
in Chinese?  If not, there is no point in applying that file.  Hints are
only used in the text edition.  I believe that there are modifications of
xterm capable of displaying chinese texts, but I don't know whether MC can
run on such terminals and whether the hints can be displayed correctly in
that setup.

You have included the charset name in the name of the hint file.  If
anybody sets "LANG=zh_TW" in the environment, the hints file won't be
loaded, even though zh_TW assumes the Big5 charset.

If you named the file mc.hint.zh_TW but the user had LANG=zh_TW.Big5 in
the environment it would be easier to fix by probing 5 first characters of
LANG (or LC_MESSAGES) after probing the whole name and before resorting to
the 2-character language code.  Doing the opposite (guessing zh_TW.Big5
from zh_TW) in the MC code would be much harder to implement - it would
require some _knowledge_ about preferred encodings in different countries.

See function load_mc_home_file in src/util.c for details.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin