Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 18:57, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> What about cooperating with kde to generate a tool that can both be used
> in kde and gnome? And possibly other products. That tool should be
> command-line based and not dependent on any gui. Then you can build the
> gui's on top.

Well, except for the "cooperating with KDE" part, that is what is
happening (and obviously some exchange of information is happening). We
have had a lot of discussions on this list (including contributions from
people who have done document translations for KDE). We developed what
looked like a group of sane, stable requirements and various people are
working on tools that generate PO files. Only. Then (and stop me if
you've heard this before, because it becomes boring typing it over and
over) people can use whatever tools they like to translate the PO files
and then another command line tool (as part of the build process)
generates the translated document.

What I am writing uses libxml2 and glib. The former is already used by
KDE, if the latter is unacceptable to some group, tough cookies -- I'm
not going to bleed from the ears just to avoid using an excellent and
readily available portability and data structure library. XML and HTML
documents are desktop-neutral if you work to the specs. I am not
covering SGML documents (pragmatic reasons, see the thread back in
February for the discussions).

The short version of my opinion (and it's only mine) is simple: right
now we have very little. We have split2po that is used by KDE and which
I think has some limitations and we have doc-i18n-tool that lives in
intltool/ and is not built and it has limitations, too. I want to build
a prototype that matches the community design and no doubt will have a
whole new set of limitations that we haven't thought of yet. Then we can
debate more or you guys can say "it's crap, put a stake through its
heart and bury it at the crossroads" or whatever. Until then, I'm
dropping out of this thread. I want to write code, not debate my choices
of things to work on (not to mention that I've said this thing is nearly
ready more times than is reasonable and I really want to finish it). I
don't mind people offering compromises and ideas, but at times I am an
inflexible bastard at heart. Deal with it. :-)

With tongue firmly in cheek,
Malcolm