Re: [java-gnome-hackers] i18n support

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 14:53 -0300, Vreixo Formoso Lopes wrote:
> I send you a little patch that add i18n support for
> java-gnome.

Thanks to Vreixo for having submitted this.

Having just invested three days of work cleaning it up, this branch is
about ready for merging [ie, I would do it now, but it's 01:30 and
that's not a good time to be merging code to 'mainline' that introduces
major changes :|]

See branch 'i18n' in hackers/andrew/.

In addition to a fairly massive editorial effort on the documentation, I
have added a fairly sweeping set of test cases and validated the
preliminary example that was submitted.

        [A patch of this importance without unit tests! What the hell?]

I then attempted to use this code to internationalize one of our own
applications. This uncovered a number of data corruption bugs due to
misuse of the underlying gettext library calls.

        [Guys, if you make C calls, you must read the man page and
        honour issues like "the return value is statically allocated, so
        don't change it." I would say that I simply won't accept patches
        with these sorts of problems, but it usually takes several hours
        of work to discover. Attention to detail would be appreciated.
        "It works!" is not really the ideal]

++

Bringing proper GNOME translation infrastructure into java-gnome is a
terrific initiative. I'm very excited to welcome this.

Remaining issues are:

a) further error checking. The underlying library is pretty useless if
the locale in force is not applicable and worse, if the parameters
supplied to Internationalization.init() are bogus nothing really
happens. We need to do quite a bit better here.

b) a slightly better example, perhaps? Last I spoke to him, Vreixo was
thinking about something.

c) another editorial pass (by someone else) on the text in
Internationalization. Someone who knows the translation tool chain a bit
better than I will no doubt have some improvements to suggest.

It'd be nice to get this squared away before 4.0.7 (which will be within
a week or two).

AfC
Sydney

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Managing Director
Operational Dynamics Consulting, Pty Ltd
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/