Re: localization of Grub

[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hello again,

Let me to re-open this thread, where we were discussing about
localization and translation:

On Sep/28/2008, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 02:19:09PM +0200, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> > > 
> > > This is wanted but nobody did work on this yet afaik.
> > > It would be good if there would be multiple keyboard layouts too I
> > > think.
> > 
> > I think that different keyboard layouts it's even more important than
> > different languages...
> > 
> > Do we have any plan? Maybe I will take a look (but during 20 days in
> > october I will not have lot of time :-( so not sure if I will do it
> > after October or not, I will see...)
> > 
> > Any suggestion for the implementation? How user would change the
> > keyboard layout? Or maybe at beginning some setting (variable) at
> > grub.cfg?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> It's very nice you want to work on localisation.  This is a very welcome
> feature (and I think it's been discussed before).
> 
> (I assume we're talking about a gettext equivalent rather than keyboard
> layouts, which is a separate -but also nice- feature)
> 
> My recommendation for a roadmap (please comment/discuss/challenge/etc!) would
> be:
> 
>   - gettextise the util tools, so they can be translated as normal programs.

Do you mean the strings that are generated in standard Linux user-space
and written to grub.cfg?

What do you (everybody in the list) think about the text help that
appears here and there (output of Grub -usually shell- commands?)
Needed? Or these texts are good enough in English (like commands in the
programming languages)

>   - add support to grub (a gettext module or so) so that it can load our .mo
>     files and obtain strings from it, by implementing gettext() (aka _()).

This part is more clear (at least theoretically, of course :-) )
I understand that all error messages, messages, etc. that Grub prints
while Grub is executing should be translated.

My understanding is that we should have some module to handle some
function (eg. _()), that would read some variable to choose to which
language, if available, translate some string. Like gettext, as you
said.

> I'd also recommend making the user interface similar to posix locales, for
> consistency's sake (which you know I hold dearly ;-)).

I agree

I'm not familiar in the .mo internals, I will take a look. I understand
that this gives us quite much flexibility, if we would implement
everything (like argument orders, etc.)

> Even if you only have time/interest to implement the first part, this
> is already a significant benefit.  Keep in mind that grub.cfg
> generation is done by update-grub which happens entirely on userland,
> so we get translated menu entries that way.

As I said before by mail, grub.cfg don't have lot of UI strings.
Some, but not a lot.

I understand that we/I should adapt some scripts using, for example, this
guideline?:
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/gettext/Preparing-Shell-Scripts.html

(I haven't tested now, I think that some years ago I did some tests with
Bash and gettext)

-- 
Carles Pina i Estany            GPG id: 0x17756391
        http://pinux.info