Re: mc: new translation

["R.I.P. Deaddog" <maddog linuxhall org>]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Pavel Roskin wrote:

> 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.

Understand that, so definitely no objection. I've just subscribed to
mc-devel too.


> 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.

Really sorry about that, and I've noticed my error just before seeing your
email. I really sucks.


> 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.

Not sure if I've done wrong, but it's a difficult decision. The transition
from native Big5 encoding to UTF8 is ongoing, so it's quite impossible to
tell what encoding users are using. It's just because the hint file itself
is using big5 encoding that I choosed to include the .Big5 name (as those
using other encoding can't see it anyway). But probably I can be wrong as
you have indicated. Since...... (see below)


> 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.

mc is reading $LANGUAGE before $LANG. However $LANGUAGE can include
multiple languages separated by colon (e.g. de:fr:hu), so what I saw is
the mc is searching for "/usr/..../mc/mc.hint.$LANGUAGE" , which of course
doesn't exist. After I renamed the file to mc.hint.zh it worked. Obviously
I have done too few testing before committing (the testing machine doesn't
have $LANGUAGE set).


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

Thanks for direction.


Abel