Re: gnome-applets/po-locations isn't very smart

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Manny,

Today at 15:42, Christian Neumair wrote:

> Although I appreciate that we have one central source for location
> strings, I think it's a big mistake to put them into the applets package
> (CVS: gnome-applets/po-locations). The ideal thing would be an
> additional location package that hasn't got any GNOME dependency.
> Imagine a third-party application that wants to include location
> information (evo for instance). It would depend on gnome-applets just
> because of this message catalogs.

Not really.  gnome-applets doesn't yet install any kind of .mo/.gmo
file (i.e. new gettext domain) for locations: it just creates XML
file which contains translations during build, and installs that.

So, that means that current behaviour of gnome-applets isn't what
you're looking for (discussed in bug #89746).

Basically, we'll need to use a different setup altogether.  First
off, there would be no post-processing of Locations.xml (no need on
using intltool-merge to merge translations back in).  One would also
need to use gettext() calls on read-in English strings, instead of
using XML parser to get the translations.

With this done, it would be trivial to adjust gnome-applets to use
external translation domain.

I can see more benefits to this approach.  Instead of fast-growing
Locations.xml (imagine 2500 strings times 40 languages, and having to 
parse this from XML file when displaying gweather configuration
dialog), we'd have pretty static Locations.xml with ~2500 entries,
and only one single gettext catalog would be loaded at runtime (so,
it would go to maximum of 2 times 2500 in parsing time, not counting
the fact that .mo's are much faster to parse than XML).

The only catch is that nobody wrote such a patch for gnome-applets,
while Gareth has wrote a patch that does the job fairly well.
Compared to the situation we had in Gnome 2.6 and earlier, we can
finally translate location names in GWeather (not to count that many
had them translated for Evolution 1.4, but they were unusable for
GWeather-applet).

Further, we separated this out into po-locations just so translators
could more easily prioritize their work.

So, with this *FIRST* step done, we can now discuss any further
steps. ;)

Christian, I suppose you're volunteering for maintaining "locations"
package somewhere, prefferably at freedesktop.org? :-P

Cheers,
Danilo


PS. Also, it even sounds more reasonable to name this "airports"
rather than "locations" ;)