[Installit-dev] i18n string extraction

Benedikt Meurer benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de
Thu Aug 25 19:54:06 CEST 2005


Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> Morning.

Hey Jannis,

> Benny, is there a common way you do extract the strings and stuff with
> in other parts of Xfce? Something more automated than xgettext + msgfmt?
> 
> I saw you store all po files and create the binary versions during the
> build process. We don't have a build process but of course we could let
> the user run some config/"build" scripts before he can use InstallIt,
> right? Perhaps during the typical python setup.py install process.

IIRC, gettext has good support for python, see

  http://docs.python.org/lib/module-gettext.html

So, why not just use gettext? It's easy to use and pretty much standard 
(e.g. translators will already know how to translate .po files, etc.).

My vision is that the new installer can still be a single file download. 
E.g. a shell script, which includes a small tarfile with the python 
scripts and the generated .mo files. No need to install anything (of 
course there should also be an installable version, but that's an 
option, not a requirement). Just double-click the downloaded script in 
your favourite file manager, and the script untars the python source and 
runs it, and cleans up after execution. That way upgrading is just 
downloading the new file and deleting the old one. The generated gettext 
.mo files and the python source (we could even ship python byte code 
here, since it's platform independent, IIRC) should be small, so the 
extraction overhead can be ignored. Does that conform with your current 
plans?

> - Jannis

Benedikt



More information about the Installit-dev mailing list