[Nagiosplug-devel] Translations and gettext

[Ton Voon]

On 20 Nov 2004, at 09:50, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> Ton Voon wrote:
>> On 19 Nov 2004, at 10:18, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>>> 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.
>

If you want conformity, then just set your language to English. But I 
wouldn't restrict someone else's use of the plugins. YMMV.

>>> 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.

When I first looked at the C plugins, I thought the configure.in and 
Makefile.am were over complicated pieces of GNU software. Now, they are 
an absolute lifesaver because they do some much for one of the aims of 
the project - to reach multiple platforms. There is no way I would 
recommend moving away from that.

Yes, there is a requirement for automake, autoconf and gettext (for 
development work only, but I think there's an outstanding bug in 
gettext at the moment). This is documented in the developer's 
guidelines. If the requirement is incorrectly documented (eg, wrong 
versions), please raise that as a bug.

>> 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.
>

Yves Mettier has implemented translations in his performance graphing 
tools. Benoit Mortier has offered to help translate. I count this as 
two votes, and that's only in the last few days. There have been 
requests before, although admittedly some time ago.

Ton