Re: [Pingus-Devel] Clanlib 0.8 has been released

[David Philippi]

Am Sonntag 20 August 2006 18:23 schrieb Ingo Ruhnke:
> Because its inflexible, unportable and quite limited in its API, ie.
> no proper way to browse which languages are available, no proper way
> to extent dictonaries (custom levels might provide their own .po),

At least that's not true. You can add new textdomains on demand. I'm more 
involved with Wesnoth those days which does this. Each user campaign may come 
with their own set of .mo files. They only need a textdomain declaration 
which is then added by the game.

> requirement to compile .po, no way to run directly from source
> directory and other stuff.

This is also possible, you just have to add the search path at runtime. 
Wesnoth uses mo files from non-standard locations for its user content.

I think the worst mistake in Pingus was to put translations directly into the 
XML files instead of extracting them into their own po files. There should be 
a pingus.pot, tutorial.pot, stoneworld.pot... If someone wants to write 
something like this, taking a look at Wesnoth and wmlxgettext should help 
quite a lot. WML is extremely similiar to XML so it shouldn't be that hard to 
adapt it to read in the strings from Pingus level files. AFAIK at least 
gettext should then be able to use different encodings as long as they're 
correctly specified in the corresponding po files.

Bye David