From: Florian Mösch <fmoesch_at_web.de>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 12:19:05 +0200

> Um, the answer was actually a list of clear technical problems with
> using GNU gettext. The problems were real, and you (or anyone else)
> couldn't offer an easy solution to the problems.

There was a little misunderstanding: I never wanted to port the gettext
library to the SH processor. *That* would probably be a problem. Right.
My suggestion was to reuse the .po file format for the .lang files.
There are tools to generate those files from te sources automagically
and other tools that help the translators. I think that *this* is not a
proble but a good idea, because in .po files all the information is
included that Daniel wants to include in his proprietary format. The
only difference is that things are called different.

> No-one even tried to do so.

I did.

> It was well demonstrated that gettext isn't a good solution for this
> platform, [...]

Not really. You are right if you say that the gettext *library* is not a
good solution for the SH firmware. But you are wrong if you state that
writing (gettext's .po file format)
   msgid "Loading..."
   msgstr "Laddar in..."
instead of (Daniels proprietary format)
   eng: "Loading..."
   new: "Laddar in..."
is a problem. I you were interested in re-thinking of the gettext
*format*, we should meet in IRC. If you dont *want* to think about my
approch let us just stop this annoying discussion.

I wrote on 2002-09-03:
   "No. I don't want to port the whole GNU libc to RockBox :-)"
and later that day in another mail:
   "You are right. The GNU gettext library is not made for a SH-1 CPU.
    But the message catalog files' format [...]"
and on the next day:
   "Again: I didn't think of implementing the gettext library on SH-1,
    but using the gettext format (.po files) for the translations."

> [...] and the other idea was better, for now.

I still don't understand why it should be better just because its calls
things different...

   Florian.
Received on 2002-09-16