I have a working support for internationalization: maxima shows the
banner in my language (which is not English). At the moment I only
have support for lisp files in src.
My proposal is this:
1) Have a function which translates strings. For the banner I used
(format t (intl:gettext "~&Maxima ~a http://maxima.sourceforge.net~%";)
*autoconf-version*)
but the function name can be changed.
2) Translations in locale directory. A makefile updates maxima.pot,
*.po and *.mo files at build time. The translations are installed into
PREFIX/share/locale/.
3) In cl-user::run (init-cl.lisp) manually set the locale and load the
translations for the intl package.
If nobody objects, I can commit this to cvs.
Andrej
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 7:16 PM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> about the i18n stuff, I'm revising MTELL and MERROR messages
> in the interest of clarity and consistency. As I go through the src/
> files I guess I'll mark the updated messages with the gettext macro
> (leading underscore). Then translators can start working on them.
>
> I'm also planning to make a test script which triggers each message.
>
> There are tools to find gettext-ified strings and dump them into a
> .po or .pot file. I don't know much about that, maybe someone who
> has done this before can explain how we should go about this.
>
> I have a few questions at this point.
>
> (1) Where in the development directories should we put the .po files?
> Where are the compiled .mo files installed?
> What kind of magic do we need in Makefile.am or whatever?
>
> (2) I guess we need to make sure the _ reader macro is defined before
> any Maxima files are processed. (I'm not 100% in favor of making
> it a reader macro; if it were a function that would be OK with me.
> It seems like with a function there is less potential for varying
> behavior among Lisp implementations. Maybe I'm worrying over
> nothing.)
>
> (3) Not sure at this point what we should do about questions
> which accept abbreviations (e.g. "positive, negative, or zero?"
> which accepts p, n, or z). Suggestions?
>
> best
>
> Robert Dodier
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