Couldn't sleep last night (tonight? today? who knows?), so I decided to finally attend to one of the big large TODOs on the MonoDevelop list. Convert our i18n from the .net resx stuff to gettext. After some emailing back and forth with Jorn (muine developer), I finally had a plan of attack. Copied some stuff from muine, hacked it into our framework, got things looking like they might work. Then I realized I had no clue at all how to even generate one of these mystical .po files. Found a wonderful gnome doc co-written by Telsa Gwynne and Dafydd Harries that helped me out on that front. Finally got a .pot file generated that contained Both translate-able data from a csharp source file and a glade file. It was somewhat rewarding, although I must say I cursed gettext a lot.
Now MonoDevelop has a en_CA translation with only two modifications currently, 'New Combine' now says 'New Combine, eh?' and "About MonoDevelop" now says... well.. you get the picture. For some reason lame jokes about canadian accents will never get old to the temporarily relocated american in me.
I have started to go through our codebase and convert it from that horrible resx i18n stuff to the much simpler and far easier to maintain gettext library. So far I only have 163 msgid's available for l10n, but I would expect that number to explode over the next couple days.
Since the mono project doesnt really have a translation team at all, I am trying to figure out the easiest way to get MonoDevelop translated. I think I am going to see if I can somehow put a .pot file onto gnome's cvs and see if some of their absolutely *amazing* translation staff will take a crack at it. It surely wont be for the meek, as I assume when it is over its going to contain a *huge* amount of strings for translation. Who knows though, we will have to see whats possible once all the existing strings that are there are setup properly.
So far, the MonoDevelop 0.2 release seems to be pretty good. Bunch of bug reports have been filed, but we need more. If MonoDevelop does anything you think it shouldn't, please file a bug, otherwise, how will we know to fix it? (seems obvious, but for some reason it doesnt seem to happen that way all the time)
I really should be sleeping, but for some reason that doesnt seem to be in the cards for this evening... anyway, back to setting up i18n for MonoDevelop.
Posted by tberman at April 2, 2004 01:16 PM