Re: [PATCH 1/2] gitk: Import msgcat for translation support

From: Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de>
Date: Jul 28, 2007, 10:40 UTC
Message-ID: <200707281240.17915.stimming@tuhh.de>
In-Reply-To: <157938.79347.qm@web38908.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Am Samstag, 28. Juli 2007 09:28 schrieb Brett Schwarz:

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> > > Import tcl's msgcat package to have the [mc...] procedure for
> > > translation available.
> >
> > if {[catch {
> >     package require msgcat
> >     # rest of your new stuff
> > }]} {
> >     proc mc {str} {
> >     return $str
> >     }
> > }
> >
> > so that everything still works if msgcat isn't available.  
>
> Junio already replied to this, and he was correct.

The conclusion is that tcl8.1 is old enough so that you can safely assume msgcat exists? Or rather: Gitk probably requires tcl8.1 anyway (is there a known required tcl version for gitk?), and hence this can be relied upon here as well.

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> However, this made me 
> think of something (that probably should be in git-gui as well) to make it
> a little more robust. We should check that the msg directory is where we
> think it is, and either give a warning, or exit the app (I would vote for
> the former).

>From what I've seen during testing, if the directory passed to msgload doesn't

exists, the function simply does nothing. Its documentation doesn't say what is going to happen on a non-existing directory, though: http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/msgcat.htm#M10

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> set msgdir [file join . msgs]      ;# or whatever this turns out to be
> if {[file exists $msgdir]} {
>     ::msgcat::mcload $msgdir
> } else {
>     puts stderr "WTF: can't find message catalog directory"
> }
>
> Or you could just use [catch] around the ::msgcat::mcload too.

I don't think [catch] changes anything, as the function rather seems to be no-op on nonexisting directory. So I think this wouldn't improve "robustness". I think this would only help in order to point out to the user that no translation has been found; however, it can't be known at this point whether this happens only because no translation exists, or whether there was some error in the installation. Probably only the latter is actually interesting to the user.

Well, in conclusion I think the msgcat function is already robust enough and neither [catch] nor the directory checking buys us anything here.

Christian