Subject: Re: i18n package for kde2?
To: Ingolf Steinbach <ingolf@jellonet.de>
From: Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 03/19/2001 10:00:21
On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Nick Hudson wrote:

> Ingolf Steinbach wrote:
> > what would be a good scheme to create internationalization
> > packages for KDE2? Three possibilities come to my mind:
> >
> > 1) One pkg which installs *all* i18n packages. This is IMO
> >    not suitable as one usually will want to use one or
> >    maybe two additional languages.

or 1a) Install all the i18n files with the base packages. Prior art is
in www/lynx, and in a way, www/lynx-current -- the developement
version of lynx includes all the message catalogs in the distribution.

Jim Spath, who filed the PR requesting the catalogs be added to the
lynx package, explained to me that there was some resistance to
"bulking up" the lynx base distribution, but I guess they came around.

> > 2) One pkg for each language. This would lead to many new
> >    directories in pkgsrc. Not suitable.
> >
> > 3) Some mechanism to use only one pkgsrc directory for the
> >    i18n stuff which can generate different packages by using
> >    an environment or mk.conf variable, e.g.
> >    Directory: pkgsrc/misc/kdei18n
> >    Can generate kdei18n-de-2.0, kdei18n-fr-2.0 etc.
> >
> > At the moment, I'd like 3), but I on't know if this is
> > possible by using pkgsrc/mk/* at the moment (without too
> > much tricks). Maybe there are much better solutions?
>
> I have a kde-i18n package that does 1). The reason I haven't committed
> it is that it really depends on kdevelop 1.4 which is too big to look at
> ATM. I agree somehting along the lines of 2) or 3) would be best.
>
> The is prior art in textproc/ted* that seems to follow 2) other than
> that I have no real opinion.

"2)" and "3)" are bad. They force a compile-time decision for what
should be a run-time decision, and they'd make it ten times as hard to
update and debug the NetBSD package.


Frederick