Re: [Noffle-devel] internationalization of noffle pseudo articles

[Jim H. <jim...@ac...>]

On 24-Mar-2003 joh...@gm... wrote:
> I think I could assist in internationalization of the
> noffle-pseude-articles (those messages getting return in pseudo.c).
> With this patch it would be possible to have a french, german and
> english version of e.g. the "article marked for download".
> 
> There are some decisions I would like to get examined before I start to code.
> 
> +I would suggest to have a file in /etc/noffle/noffle.articles.{ccTLD},
> {ccTLD} being the country-Top-Level-Domain for the country generally
> associated with that language, e.g. de for german, fr for france ...
> 
I think it would be easier to have one file per message, perhaps filed under a
language-specific directory, e.g. /etc/noffle/templates.en_GB/general_info.
Specify the language in the config file, or pick it up from the environment
(LANG) if it is not specified in the config. Then see if a file exists in
this order (for LANG=en_GB): templates.en_GB/filename, templates.en/filename,
templates/filename. Keep the current hard-coded defaults in case none are
found.

Describe the template format in a new man page noffle.template.

> Problem: The are maybe some languages which are not specific to a
> country (what was the Top-Level-Domain for Esperanto again ;-) ) and
> maybe in some country more than language is officially used.

> Question: How shall we determine which user gets his message in which
> language. Should there be a global "noffle-now-be-german"-switch in the
> config-file ? Should we default german pseudo messages for e.g.
> de.*-newsgroups ?

I don't think we can do anything about trying to decide on a per-user basis.
NNTP tells us nothing about the user. Environments that need to support
multiple languages amongst their users will simply have to have multi-lingual
messages.

> This noffle.articles.{ccTLD} file would have the folloing format
> message_entry =  ' < ' message-designator ' > ' \n message-text
> message-designator = 'text'
> message-text = 'text'

Having each message in its own file saves all sorts of syntax. We can just have
the message pretty much as it will appear (once a few extra headers are added).

Subject: [ NOFFLE: Article counter inconsistent ]

This group's article counter is not consistent.
Probably the remote news server ...

Don't forget that we need to be able to insert values into the messages, e.g.
the 'retrieve failed' message. I suggest this is done by some sort of variable
substitution, e.g. (for the inconsistent count message):

Group: $GROUP
Remote first article number: $REMOTE_FIRST
Remote last article number: $REMOTE_LAST
Remove next article number: $REMOTE_NEXT
Refetching from article: $REFETCH_FROM

-- 
Jim Hague - jim...@in... (Work), ji...@be... (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift or you don't control.