Things I'd like to get done for beta2

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Am Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:52:18 -0700
schrieb "Brian J. Tarricone" <bjt23 at cornell.edu>:

> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> 
> > 2. Use generic names/titles in all settings dialogs and settings
> > menu items. Instead of things like "Xfce Settings Manager" or
> > "Xfce4 Mouse Settings" or "Mouse Settings" use "Preferences" (or
> > "Settings") or "Mouse". Due to the context (all these dialogs are
> > part of the settings menu and show up inside the settings manager),
> > they don't need to have that "Settings" suffix, I think.
> 
> I'm fine with this... I'm thinking about removing support for 
> GenericName/X-XfceSettingsName entirely from the settings manager.
> 
> > 3. Rework strings in all core components. Fix typos, improve
> > grammar, remove ambiguous expressions. Simplify strings and improve
> >    consistency where it makes sense.
> 
> Yeah, this is super necessary.  Most of our strings aren't the best,
> and even in cases where they're pretty good, they're usually not very 
> consistent across modules.
> 
> > 4. Add X-XfcePluggable and X-XfceHelpFile support to all settings
> >    dialogs.
> 
> I was going to work on this a bit last night, but I fell asleep.
> Most of them seem to be in good shape with pluggable support; just a
> couple more to go.  Most are missing help files tho.

Yeah, help files are a problem. But since they don't really are "code"
maybe we can still work on those after beta 2. One thing about plugging
support: I noticed that startup notification does only work with
dialogs and not with embedded widgets unless you call 

  gdk_notify_startup_complete()

after creating the GtkPlug. I've added this to the settings dialogs in
xfce4-settings. It needs to be added to the rest of our dialogs as
well.

> >    How important are the docs at this point? If I remember
> >    correctly, they need to be translated.
> 
> Most of our docs were never translated, and those that were usually
> only got translated into one or two languages.  Getting all the doc
> strings in to .po files would maybe make this easier?  Not sure what
> the i18n team would prefer.

Seems like those HTML docs that have been translated were just copied
from C/ to $LOCALE/ in the docs folder of the related package. If it's
easy to extract the strings from the original HTML and put it into the
pot file chances are higher that these documents will actually be
translated. I doubt this is easily possible, so maybe stick to copying
just like it is currently done is best. Dunno.

> >    I guess we'll have to add a
> >    string freeze exception for the docs because a lot of the new
> >    components (xfce4-settings, xfconf, xfce4-mixer etc.) don't have
> > any end-user documentation at all.
> 
> Yes, yet another reason why rewriting things that work well enough as 
> they are is a bad idea ^_~.  Not that I should talk; I need to write
> all new docs for xfdesktop's new settings dialog...

Hah, yeah.

  - Jannis
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