[Koha-devel] translation complaint...

[paul POULAIN]

Hi everybody,

I leave my computer for 2 days, and you begin a revolution :-)

My thoughts :
In french we have a little proverb that say "the Best may be the ennemy 
from the Good".
That's the first thing I wanted to say : we need to release a stable 
version, so we have to stop improve koha one day !

Second proverb, well known from perl-mongers : "there's more than one 
way to do it".
We could use gettext to translate koha. We even took a look at a XML 
parser tool with Chris iirc. We have MANY solutions to translate koha.
But which is the best ??? none I think.
* gettext : we can't have themes, and maybe get problems with non 8859-1 
languages. I translated gnucash in French, which used gettext. That's 
not a "perfect" way to translate too imho !
* templates : we have to rewrite dozen of times the same word.
* XML parser : i could'nt even install the tool :-(, too complicated for 
simple installs.
* template+ <TMPL_VAR name="TEXT_xxx"> for some words : needs some 
benchmarks tests, but seems a nice idea (best from both worlds)

So, I think :
We made a choice some months ago, and this choice was not bad. Could be 
perfected thought ! Let's go to the 2.0 version with it, and let's see 
for 2.0.x if we can improve it !

Note : I remember everybody that our first wish is to satisfy 
LIBRARIANS. Programmer happyness is a little bit less important !

-- 
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)