Re: Translate the WineFAQ to French (gettext)

[Francois Gouget]

Detlef Riekenberg wrote:
> Am Montag, den 23.05.2005, 13:18 +0200 schrieb Francois Gouget:
> > > > Can we easily patch it to get rid of it? We don't need localized
> > > > messages, maybe we can provide a dummy gettext.pm?
> > >
> > > For the winetools shell-script, i use this function, ...
> >
> > po4a is all perl so this does not work.
>
> See my words below the Code 
> "... but pearl is not my language." :-)
>
> The Code was just a hint,

I understand.
All I was saying is that po4a does not just call the 'gettext' command 
line utility. It links to the Locale::gettext perl module and then calls 
its gettext() and dgettext() functions. So it's not as simple as just 
wrapping the gettext tool in a script.

And, the gettext.pm perl module does not use the command line utility 
either. Instead it directly links with libgettext.so and won't load if 
it's missing.

So we basically have four solutions:
  1) rip out all references to '.*gettext.*' from po4a. But this will 
result in a big diff which will make it hard to merge with later versions.
  2) modify po4a to abstract all calls to gettext. This will also result 
in a big diff but might possibly be accepted upstream.
  3) write a fake Locale::gettext perl module and force po4a to use it 
by hacking PO4AENV. Plus more hacks so users who have a real gettext.pm 
module can use it and get errors in their own language.
  4) accept that Locale::gettext.pm is a requisite to running po4a and 
instruct users to install it.

But I have completed an analysis of the Wine documentation dependencies 
and I think that solutions 1-3 above are moot as they solve only a tiny 
bit of the problem. Here's the dependency list:

* docbook2html / db2html & co (command line tools)
    Needed to generate Html, Pdf, etc.
    Provided by docbook-utils on Debian, Fedora Core and SUSE.

* Locale::gettext (perl module)
    Needed by po4a for localization.
    Provided by liblocale-gettext-perl on Debian, perl-Locale-gettext on 
Mandrake, perl-gettext on SUSE.

* Text::WrapI18N (perl module)
    Needed by po4a, probably to wrap the text to put it into the po file 
and to generate the sgml file.
    Pure perl (so easy to check in) but depends on Text::CharWidth which 
is not pure perl. This one was not used in po4a 0.16.2 but I suspect 
this caused trouble with multibyte locales.
    Provided by libtext-wrapi18n-perl on Debian. Not found on SUSE.

* Term::ReadKey (perl module)
    Needed by po4a. Not sure why.
    Provided by libterm-readkey-perl on Debian, perl-Term-ReadKey on 
Mandrake, perl-TermReadKey on SUSE.

* SGMLS
    Needed by po4a to interface with the nsgmls parser.
    Pure perl (so easy to check in).
    Provided by libsgmls-perl on Debian, perl-SGMLS on SUSE.

* nsgmls (command line tool)
    Needed by po4a to parse the Sgml files.
    Provided by sp on Debian, opensp on SUSE.

So there's really no point to focus on Locale::gettext.pm. Also we 
cannot remove all these dependencies without breaking po4a completely. 
Finally we could check in all of those. But, except for the pure perl 
modules, these require a C compiler, which means headers and libraries 
to link with... We'd be adding more dependencies than we remove.

So I think the best is to check for those in the configure script and 
inform the user of missing dependencies. I attached a patch that does 
that for illustration purposes.