Re: Fw: gettext support

[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hola,

On Jun/21/2009, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 20:42 +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 06:22:36PM +0100, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> > > > > It's not a problem. We need two locations anyway: one where make 
> > > > > install
> > > > > copies them and the other one where ./grub-install copies them. Would 
> > > > > it be
> > > > > possible to use /usr/share/grub/locale/$LANG.mo rather than
> > > > > /usr/share/locale/$LANG/LC_MESSAGES/grub.mo? It would make 
> > > > > grub-install
> > > > > easier
> > > > 
> > > > No, for system locales we need to use standard locations, or the 
> > > > userland
> > > > gettext won't find them.
> > > 
> > > No, for example:
> > 
> > Uhm, okay.  But I'd really prefer if we could stick to the standard paths
> > anyway :-)
> 
> Do we really need to localize the bootloader?  I think localization of
> the tools should be sufficient.

By the moment I translated this string (as an example):
+"      Use the %C and %C keys to select which entry is highlighted.\n"

+"      Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit the\n"
+"      commands before booting or 'c' for a command-line."

I think that some users can find themselves more comfortable if this is
in their language. So, they install some distribution in some language,
they restart and the first screen... is in another language.

Even this can be important to say that we have the GNU/Linux
operating system 100% translated.

> Even Linux kernel is not localized, and it's more likely to tell the
> user something important than the bootloader.  Besides, how would you

Kernel, under normal circumstancies, is not talking to the user during
the booting process. Grub does.

> ask the user about the preferred language at the boot time?  If anything
> goes wrong, it's likely that the translations won't be available, and if
> everything is fine, the user would just pick an item from the menu, and
> the menu can be localized when it's generated.

Well, we could have another approach and this is also nice:

_all_ strings that appears in a normal boot process (like the ones that
I showed above) are part of the grub.cfg file. So, when grub.cfg file is
generated we could have:

set updowntext="Use the %C and %C keys to select which entry is
highlighted."
set bootother="Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit
the\ncommands before booting or 'c' for a command-line."

So, when we will translate the userland part translated all that the
users will see will be translated.

> As for the tools localization, we should follow the standards.

I think that this is the only thing that everybody agred from the
beginning :-)

-- 
Carles Pina i Estany
        http://pinux.info