Re: [PATCH] Internationalization of git-gui

From: Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de>
Date: Jul 20, 2007, 08:56 UTC
Message-ID: <20070720105602.7dcm241ts0k0ww88@webmail.tu-harburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <20070720050455.GN32566@spearce.org>

Quoting "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Brett Schwarz <brett_schwarz@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> This is a good idea. However, I assume the _ proc is just sugar. It
>> might be better to follow a more "standard" way for this, and just
>> import the msgcat namespace, and then you can just use [mc].
>>
>> package require msgcat
>> namespace import ::msgcat::*
>>   .
>>   .
>> .mbar add cascade -label [mc Repository] -menu .mbar.repository
>
> Not just better, I'd prefer it.  The proc name "_" is cute but
> is just too darn short.  I would much prefer to use "mc" and just
> say that "mc" in all of git-gui's namespaces is reserved for the
> message catalog

I used (and prefer) "_" because that's the standard function name for i18n'd strings when using gettext (talking about a "standard" way). In that case the convention from C simply carries over to tcl/tk, and programmers who have worked with gettext in C before, which uses _("some message"), directly apply what they already know. [mc ..], on the other hand, would be a tcl-only function name which doesn't give too much of a hint of what this function does, except for those programmers who happen to know that tcl's translation is done by a package called msgcat. One might rather consider something like [tr ...], for "translate", or even [i18n ...].

That being said, I'm rather agnostic on which proc name you really prefer. Just pick one.

Being a newcomer on this list, could you please explain to me how to proceed with the i18n patches so far? Do you want to have patches submitted after some further changes (which ones?) and/or in different formats? Do you prefer to have all changes in a smaller number of commit rather than split the way I did before? Should I wait for some more days/weeks/whatever until you or particular other developers have reviewed the patches? Thanks.

Christian