[Nagiosplug-devel] Translations and gettext

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ton Voon wrote:
> 
> 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 a
> translational ability is overall A Good Thing.
> 

I would rather have conformity. I wouldn't want some checks to output 
english and some others to output swedish. Besides, the target audience 
(network admins) are usually required to speak english to do their job 
anyway.

>> 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.

But submitted patches should always be against latest CVS, right?
How about including the configure script in CVS then?
sh tools/setup fails miserably without recent versions of auto* and gettext.

> 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.
> 

But are they? I haven't seen any questions regarding translations on 
any of the mailing lists, and seeing as there aren't any translations 
completed I would half expect users who want them to ask for them.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer