[Nagiosplug-devel] Translations and gettext

[Ton Voon]

On 19 Nov 2004, at 10:18, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> I've been wondering about the value of plugin translations, 
> considering a few points.
>
> 1. There doesn't seem to be any actual translations (although the 
> groundwork has been laid for german and french).
>
> 2. It's always a pain to keep such things up to date. Wouldn't it be 
> wiser to concentrate on code development instead?

That's why I would like some volunteers to keep translations up to date 
- they can be given CVS access for the necessary files only. From my 
experience with gettext so far, it doesn't get too much in the way of 
development.

> 3. Scripts aren't translated, so the usefulness is somewhat crippled.

True, but there was demand for translated output and I think that 
translational ability is overall A Good Thing.

> 4. It adds a requirement for gettext if you want to help with 
> development. gettext may be installed by default on many platforms, 
> but it's not on HP-UX, AIX, Tru64 and many of the others, so it could 
> quite possibly have negative impact for contributors looking to fix 
> issues on some of the less common distributions.

Only developers taking the CVS code out would be affected. The 
requirements for automake and autoconf are not necessary if you just 
take the distributions and change a single line in C or perl. I started 
making contributions to the project without any need for automake, 
autoconf, gettext or docbook-utils.

It is a risk that we are raising the barrier to entry, but that is a 
price to pay if translations are worth keeping.

Ton