Marking translatable strings

[François Pinard]

bwarsaw at python.org writes:

> There's been discussion on the mailman-developers at python.org list and
> you can peruse the archives for much of the current thinking.  [...]

Thanks for the reference.  I'll look it up.  You keep me busy, guys! :-)

> The first attempts in the Mailman community for marking strings
> followed the reasoning you did.  I don't like it because I want to be
> able to use any string spelling as translatable strings.

I followed your advice, and now would like to accept any wild concatenation
of one or more strings as an argument for _().  For the equivalent of N_()
in C, I would rather use ''"... or ""'...  The extractor could have an
option for getting module doc strings, call doc strings of def doc strings
(maybe 1, 2 or 3, depending on how inclusive you want to be).

> What I /have/ done is start work on a pygettext.py script [...]  it knows
> a lot about Python syntax, including the 9 billion ways to spell `string'.

I'll surely scrutinise it.  What I would like is a single program, probably
written in C and Flex, that would handle, C, C++, Python, awk, bash,
other PO files, and maybe Emacs LISP and Scheme as well, Perl maybe, all
in one run.  That is, all possibly translatable strings of a whole project.

In my own Makefiles, I do not hesitate to rebuild PO files whenever any
source is modified, so the POT extractor ought to be blazing fast.

> The output is pretty close to .po style, with strings normalized to
> .po format.

Whatever that means! :-) There has been some extra-fuziness in that area
that is not fully resolved in `gettext' 0.10.35.  So, until everything
gets corrected, the TP robot patiently normalises everything it handles.

> I'd love to get any comments or patches that you might come up with.

Give me some time, because I'm a slow worker (not to say overwhelmed,
but this is all our case, isn't it?  "I'll be back" (just imagine the
voice of Arnold Schwartzeneger, here :-).

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard