Re: [Duplicity-talk] Version 0.5.04 Released

[Michael Terry]

On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Edgar Soldin <address@hidden> wrote:
> - Why use sophisticated APIs, coming with dependencies, if only a text
> substitution is needed.

Translation is actually a very interesting problem, both in terms of
the actual substition and the proces.  Gettext does a very good job of
it.

Things like saying "three priests walked into a bar" gets complicated
by many languages having 'non-standard' pluralization (some languages,
for example, have special plural forms for 3 or 4 versus other
numbers).  So gettext does a good job handling those with its ngettext
call.  And it goes out of its way to be low-impact in terms of
memory/speed (has its own binary format and all).

It also has good process.  .po files have very good tools support and
buy-in from a large body of translators.  If we were to use any of the
open source translation services, they would certainly expect the po
format.

In short, there's a reason everyone under the sun (in FOSS-land) uses
it.  It's a very mature translation solution, that would be hard for
us to duplicate by ourselves, just to avoid depending on a library by
writing a new one.

-mt