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Date:      Wed, 28 Jan 1998 16:55:31 +0900 (JST)
From:      Michael Hancock <michaelh@cet.co.jp>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        HOSOKAWA Tatsumi <hosokawa@ntc.keio.ac.jp>, dag-erli@ifi.uio.no, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: /usr/src/release/sysinstall needs YOU. :-) 
Message-ID:  <Pine.SV4.3.95.980128162707.22147D-100000@parkplace.cet.co.jp>
In-Reply-To: <29874.885965046@time.cdrom.com>

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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





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