[Proposal] Merging the gettext branch into trunk

Hi,
As the advantages of using gettext have been discussed and debated a
year ago in this mail thread, I would like to see a merge of the
gettext work done by Keith Bowes into the trunk. The gettext branch is
located at [1], and we also thought that it would be beneficial to
merge sooner as Aseem starts porting AbiWord to gtk-3. There may still
be a few pending issues hither and thither which we may need to fix
before and/or sooner after the merge.

Keith, would you be able to work more on this in your spare time
towards the merge? Is there any concern that you see regarding the
merge?
Suggestions and thoughts are welcome.

[1] http://svn.abisource.com/abiword/branches/gsoc2009gettext/

Thank you.
Regards,
Pradeeban.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Dominic Lachowicz
<domlachowicz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Several benefits include:
>
> * Many (the majority?) of translators are familiar with and already use gettext
> * There are tools (including automated tools) that work with gettext
> * The code is maintained by someone other than us
>
> You get none of those benefits with a proprietary format.
>
> 2009/11/17 SSK <eskaer_spamsink@ngs.ru>:
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "J.M. Maurer" <uwog@uwog.net>
>> To: <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 4:03 AM
>> Subject: Roadmap for AbiWord 3.0
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> After AbiWord 2.8 comes AbiWord 3.0 (let's skip 2.10, people will be
>>> confused), which means we need to decide what to put in it.
>>>
>>> Fridrich already committed some work towards a Windows 64 bit port, so
>>> that will be in 3.0 to start.
>>>
>>> Then we have some stuff lined up in branches that we need to decide upon
>>> when to merge:
>>>
>>> 1. gsoc2009gettext - port abiword to gettext, making plugins localizable
>>> 2. gsoc2009unicode - make the Win32 port a true unicode application
>>> 3. gsoc2009tablelayout - improve (table layout) performance, includes
>>> the new PieceTable.
>>
>>
>> Why use gettext? In my opinion, it is not an elegant system: it stores translations in binary format, which requires special development tools to (de)compile; also it has some ugly hacks like embedding of non-printable characters in keywords to prevent undesired string merging, and run-time interpreting of expression for plural form(s). The current *.string format is good enough: usable and clear.
>
>
>
> --
> "I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization." --  Oliver Wendell Holmes
>

-- 
Kathiravelu Pradeeban.
Software Engineer.
WSO2 Inc.
Blog: [Llovizna] http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/