Re: [Bashburn-info] Gettext support

[Steven W. O. <st...@sy...>]

On Wednesday, Sep 10th 2008 at 15:39 -0000, quoth Markus Kollmar:

=>Hm, I have just began some weeks before to check/playing and learning to 
=>do gettext for bashburn.
=>I stoped the work, because I thought it is a great thing,  but one must 
=>have support for gettext in the lib's of the system.
=>And I was not shure whether it would be worth for us to do - I thought 
=>at first the priority to improve bashburn functionality would be more 
=>interesting for the most.
=>
=>But I see now the discussion here, which is interesting. What do the 
=>others think? Should we rely that a bashburn user has/need i18n 
=>(internationalization) support?
=>
=>If the most agree to use gettext, i can start working and experimenting 
=>and to find out a strategy we can best implement gettext in bashburn, if 
=>it is wished.

I took a look at how this might look.

A po file is a single language mapping file.  So you need multiple po 
files, one file per language.  Then using gettext() you can translate from 
English to whatever foreign language you want based on the setlocale() 
language setting. (This means that BBLANG would just go away.)

Note that the po files are generated from (I think) the pot files. IOW, 
the pot files are src code and the po files are the result of a Makefile.

So in your bashcode you might have something like:

  printf $(gettext "Hello, %s, you have %d messages waiting.\n" \
	name msgs)

and then your po file would contain the mapping of this string to the
language specific translations.  For example es.po would contain:

#: ../src/foo.c:244
msgid "Hello, %s, you have %d messages waiting.\n"
msgstr "Hola %s, usted tiene esperar de %d mensajes.\n"

Your question about lib support is a non-issue. Literally every system has 
all of the support needed. The part that I'm not yet comfortable with is 
the idea of whether this is of value in a shell script since these 
utilities were designed originally for C code. My feeling is that this is 
not a problem, but since I've never been wrong before, it's bound to 
happen sometime. ;-)

Markus, since you've actually looked at this before, can you take a stab 
at implementing a HelloWorld.sh?

-- 
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steveo at syslang.net