Re: [Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>] Re: GNOME and migrating to utf-8

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas online no>]

Den 09 Mar 2001 15:19:17 +0100, skrev Pablo Saratxaga:
> Kaixo!
> 
> On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 11:14:11AM -0500, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> > Forwarding this in case you're not on gnome-hackers gnome org
> > 
> > It seems we will have to revert the utf8 changes for GNOME 1.4. At least
> > this is how
> > I read the below.
> 
> Can you tell me the list of CVS modules (specially those not being HEAD)
> 

The list of modules going into GNOME 1.4 (including branch info) is
located in the "releng" cvs module.

> >                 * With my 10 minute research it seems that gettext doesn't
> >         allow you to determine whether a given translation is UTF-8 or
> >         some indestinguishable random 8bit string. So we can't convert    
> 
> It can. ...as long as the translator has enabled the header and correctly
> filled the charset= field, and a glibc version with proper iconv() is available.
> 

strings handled by gettext isn't the problem here. The problem is that
strings from other places are
placed into the .po file for easy translation and merged back into
.desktop, .oaf, .glade and other files
when building the package.

> >         UTF-8 strings to some 8 bit subset to render, since we can't tell
> >         it's UTF-8.
> 
> It is also possible to blindly try a conversion, if it was utf-8, the
> conversion will be ok, display the result; if it fails, assume it wasn't
> utf-8 but locale dependent, display the source as is.
> 

Considering that we're nearing freeze for GNOME 1.4 it might be too late
to do anything to
change the code in question to handle this.

> >> The problem of GNOME not handling this is also visible in that we
> >> can't display the KDE menus correctly since these are in utf-8.  
> 
> Blindly converting all menu etc files as if they were in utf-8, then having
> a fallback to display without conversion if the conversion fails will solve
> that problem.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you can point me to the place where the translation of those files is
> done on Gnome source, I will try a small patch.
> 


Like Michael said, one of the main problems is libxml not handling
utf-8. This is used to parse the 
.xml, .glade, .oaf files and possibly others. Also the .desktop handling
code in gnome-core doesn't
handle utf-8 and likely the gnome-vfs code that handles .keys files.

Cheers
Kjartan Maraas