[Installit-dev] i18n string extraction

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> Yep, gettext is fine, it's just a mess to generate the .po files each
> time (since it has to collect information from various files). I once
> wrote a graphical solution for this for my employee (in Ruby). Let me
> see if I can write a solution in bash which allows us to define all
> files relevant for xgettext in just one file and generate the different
> .po files using that. Ok?

A simple Makefile should do the trick. Or even a simple python script 
(because we're using python anyway). A dependency on bash doesn't sound 
like a good idea to me.

>>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?
> 
> Sounds like a good idea. Anyway, I would still provide both: A
> single-file-program and a distribution which is installed into the
> user's system. We could write a little helper program to generate the
> one-click-thingy for us so it won't be much effort for every release.
> But I don't like to integrate this functionality into the core
> sourcecode, I guess that's understandable.

We can port it from the Ruby scripts. The core should be organized that 
it can be used easily in both cases.

> Regards,
> Jannis

Benedikt