Re: Summary (Re: A system for localizing documentation strings)

[Jan Djärv]

Jean-Christophe Helary skrev:
> On 27 juil. 07, at 18:04, Jan Djärv wrote:
>
> > Jason Rumney skrev:
> > > Jan Djärv wrote:
> >
> > We can not guarantee that maintainers of external lisp packages will do
> > anything, regardless of what mechanism Emacs use.  But the point is 
> > that Emacs
> > is unlikely to be translated by the translation teams that are already 
> > outh
> > there if a completely new mechanism that differs much from gettext is 
> > adopted.
>
> This is preposterous. There are plenty of localization teams that handle 
> many different processes, source files, translation tools.

I'm sure they are, but within GNU?

> Gettext is far from being the only way to localization. And here I mean 
> localization as menu items + interface messages + documentation, where 
> documentation weights much more than all the other strings combined.
>
> Besides, gettext may be good for short sentences (specifically menu 
> items and short messages) but documentation translation is a totally 
> different process.

There are longer strings in applications that use gettext than many function 
documentation strings in elisp.  As for manuals, that is another matter.

> Obviously the self-documentation feature that is advertised as one of 
> emacs's specificity should be handled in a very emacsy way that fits 
> with its paradigm.

That is not at all obvious.  For example, the self documentation relies on C 
code to extract the documentation, not lispy at all.

        Jan D.