Re: [eGroupWare-developers] Proposal for changing the lang files directory

[Oscar M. G. S. <om...@es...>]

Ralf Becker escribió:
> Hi Oscar,

Hi, Ralf.

> Oscar Manuel Gómez Senovilla schrieb:
>> Hi.
>>
>>
>> I'd like to know your opinion about I've been thinking about for a lot
>> of time, but never had the time to do it.
>>
>> As surely (at least) most of you know, egw has always placed the
>> translation files (egw_*.lang) in a directory called<app>/setup/,
>> except for the "setup" application itself, being in setup/lang/ directory.
>>
>>   From my point of view, this has several problems:
>> 1) Mix code files (.php files) in the setup directory together with
>> non-code (lang files) in the same directory. I think this is at least
>> somehow dirty, and most of the l10n-aware php apps I know dedicate a
>> directory for lang files only.
>
> One could argue lang files are in setup directory, as they are used
> (like the other stuff in that directory) only during setup time.


Well, let me disagree. If I'm not wrong they're used:
- During setup time
- During login time
- Intensively during "translation" time (i.e. translators), in write mode.
- During the translation module in sitemgr (yes, rarely used in production)?


I didn't mention, because I found it obvious, that the perspective that 
led to do this proposal is to take a look from a translator point of 
view more than from a developer's one, but of course I take it into 
account, and I want to minimize the dedicated time by a developer to 
this task, that can be "annoying" for him.


>> 2) Extra coding, because depending on the app, the lang files are
>> located in one directory or another.
>
> So far every change in the lang files, created more extra code, as we
> either have to change all old apps too, or add support for the old and
> new location/name, as we did with the last change.


Yes, I already mentioned that, and I'll take care about both locations.


>> 3) No need for translators to write in the setup directory, just one
>> specific and well-known directory. Also, I can't think at this time (for
>> most users) of any reason to write in the egw tree (maybe only if the
>> developer tools -aka translation tools- are installed).
>
> Sorry to say: in my opinion that creates far more trouble then it's worth!

I agree that for a developer the rate of dedicated time will not revert 
in something useful to him, but I think this change would become egw a 
more "translation-friendly" suite. ;)

> Specially for us (Stylite), as we create our EPL releases from Trunk
> every half a year (as we do it ever 1-2 years with community releases).
>
> Merging of translations from Trunk back into a branch becomes a lot
> harder, if it's not the same file.


Well, if you're very about to release one of these EPL releases, then 
this change could wait until then, and "go mature" during about the next 
six months after the release. Anyway, the change would be atomic, so the 
apps that would have the change would be all or none, and there should 
be no problem. Also, if some app (for any reason) would be using the old 
(current) directory, there will be backwards compatibility.


> A compromise might be to just rename setup's lang directory to setup
> too. That would in fact same some extra code.


Well, I think you mean "save" instead of "same".


Regards.


> Ralf
>
>> There maybe others, but these are enough to me.
>>
>> So, I propose to create and use the 'lang' directory in every app to
>> host the lang files. I've been taking a look and I think everything is
>> in the translation class. The problems that I think that can be found
>> with this change are:
>>
>> 1) The amount of work to be done. I think I can (I'll try to) do it
>> myself, but before committing code, I'd ask the changes to be granted,
>> for if there was something wrong, or bad coding style, etc.
>> 2) The change would be only in trunk, so stable releases wouldn't be
>> affected. Hopefully next stable release>  1.7 (I haven't seen any
>> roadmap about it).
>> 3) There has to be some backward compatibility (as it happened when I
>> changed the prefix from 'phpgw*.lang' to 'egw*.lang'), because there are
>> some apps running on top of egroupware not being part of the egw
>> repository itself that would need to change if using the latest trunk,
>> so there must be some time for them and their users to not force the change.
>>
>>
>> Well, what do you think?
>>
>>
>> Regards.
>>
>


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