From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jan 27 23:56:32 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA14529 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 27 Jan 1998 23:56:32 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from parkplace.cet.co.jp (parkplace.cet.co.jp [202.32.64.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA14519 for ; Tue, 27 Jan 1998 23:56:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from michaelh@cet.co.jp) Received: from localhost (michaelh@localhost) by parkplace.cet.co.jp (8.8.8/CET-v2.2) with SMTP id HAA23434; Wed, 28 Jan 1998 07:55:31 GMT Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 16:55:31 +0900 (JST) From: Michael Hancock To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: HOSOKAWA Tatsumi , dag-erli@ifi.uio.no, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /usr/src/release/sysinstall needs YOU. :-) In-Reply-To: <29874.885965046@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk On Tue, 27 Jan 1998, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > The major problems of multilingual support is: it modifies almost > > *ALL* messages by adding message tags (except msgDebug() messages). > > Modifications made near any messages, always bring about the .rej's of > > patch, and I have to sync *ALL* of these changes manually (especially > > it's very hard work for menus.c). > > I'm always happy to adjust to a new msg database scheme, I just need > to see support for it merged into the -current and 2.2 sources first > so that I can abide by whatever new conventions are in effect when I > make further changes. It's not just the msg database. I think the last time this was brought up you were taken aback by the wc_foo() functions to handle wide-chars. If you want to have a single source base that handles English, Japanese or whatever; whoever maintains the code will have to accept these functions and or equivalent and get used to having them around. As more languages are incorporated it may occasionally require sizing and positioning adjustments of screens and dialogs to accomodate all different language translations, it can be a pain but overall it's not that bad. I think Novell has interesting internationalization tools, I heard that their msg database has information such as the maximum length of the message. This way the translators who often weren't programmers could build the msg database independently and the programmer didn't have to get back to the translator to get alternative translations for things that just wouldn't fit. Regards, Mike Hancock -- michaelh@cet.co.jp http://www.cet.co.jp CET Inc., Daiichi Kasuya BLDG 8F, 2-5-12 Higashi Shinbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105 Japan Tel: +81-3-3437-1761 Fax: +81-3-3437-1766