Re: zh_TW.Big5.po: illegal control sequence

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hi, Pablo!

> Note also that the compiled mo format is the same; that is, the difference
> is only forbuilding the package, there is no difference for the user,
> a package built with gettext 0.10.35 can be used on a Red Hat 7.1 without
> problems.

That's good.

By the way, I assume you have some influence in the GNOME project. Could
you request that the shared "intl" directory is upgraded to
gettext-0.10.37? With GNOME 2.0 planned for winter it maybe the perfect
time to do it.

> > I also tested the charset translation with 0.10.37. MC works fine with
> > LANG=ru_RU.ISO8859-5 on rxvt with an iso-8859-5 font. But the hints are
> > displayed incorrectly, because they are not using gettext.
>
> whzt hints, the icons ones? That is done in the *.desktop files, and
> needs a different handling.

No, MC is a text program running on a terminal and displaying nice blue
panels :-)

Hints are text messages that appear above the command line be default.
They are loaded from files with names like mc.hint.es and mc.hint.ru,
dependent on the locale. The charset is not specified in those files.

> Imho it should be done like this (I already successfully used that method
> with other prgrams):
>
> - change all the files to use utf-8 encoding

Perhaps it's an overkill for a text-only program. Maybe not, I don't know.

> > Unfortunately, gmc doesn't work correctly with LANG=ru_RU.ISO8859-5. Maybe
> > it's fixed in the head branch of Gtk+.

Actually, it doesn't work on one machine (RedHat 7.1), but it does
work on the other (RedHat 7.0). It looks great!

Data for the system where it works.

> It may be an X11 or gtkrc problem.
> when you launch LANG=ru_RU.ISO8859-5 gmc in an xterm, is there some error
> messages?

No.

> what gives a 'grep ru_RU /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/locale*'

Too much to post here. But it includes
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/locale.dir:iso8859-5/XLC_LOCALE       ru_RU.ISO8859-5

> what is the contents of /etc/gtk/gtkrc.ru* and /usr/share/gtk/gtkrc.ru* ?

The contents is pretty standard. But I found /etc/gtk/gtkrc.ru_RU.iso88595
from gtk+-1.2.10-ximian.8. That must be the reason why it works.

> So, what is better you think, use big5 encoding, and requiring new gettext;
> or using utf-8, and requiring on some systems to use internal gettext
> (but on those systems, don't they also need GNU gettext to compile the po
> files?).

Changing the charset is a political issue. Upgrading gettext is not. Thus
I prefer the later.

As much as I would like to see all people in the world using the same
encoding, I realize that we here cannot do it by applying iconv to the
files that we didn't write.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin