[Installit-dev] i18n string extraction

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Benedikt Meurer schrieb:
> 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.

Makefiles might be misleading here. We'll use a Python script, that's
even easier.

> 
> 
>>>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.

Well, the only thing we'll have to do is packing the right files into an
archive, put this into the final shell script and deliver it. That
shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to write down a note in the mailinglist
summaries for this so we can recall this idea later.

The shell script of course should execute the same script as the normal
distribution does but I don't see any difficulties here, do you?

- Jannis