[pmwiki-users] Internationalization issues

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Mar 2 13:36:39 CST 2007


On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 07:35:28PM +0100, Oliver Betz wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> "Simply unpack the archive" (i18n.tgz) as suggested in 
> "Internationalizations" is not what I consider suitable, there are 
> too many drawbacks.

I've been wanting to clean up the i18n.tgz files (and separate
them into separate language distributions), but haven't had a lot
of time to do that.

> The filenames contain 8 bit characters which I usually don't want to 
> have on my PC. Is it really the intention to save pages with 
> arbitrary 8 bit characters in filenames, unencoded?

If the question is "is it supposed to work this way?", the answer
is "yes".  If the question is "is this the long term plan", the
answer is "no -- see the RoadMap".  Eventually I plan to come
up with a nicer encoding for filenames.

> That's ugly, IMNSHO. On linux, "ls" shows only question marks, 
> midnight commander fails also. On Windows, it doesn't look better. 
> 7Zip and Powerarchiver didn't even extract the correct names - 
> Cygwin's tar did the job finally.

It depends on how well the various utilities and filesystems understand
the character encoding that was used when the pages were created.
On some Linux systems the characters look fine (ISO-8859-1) or not
find (UTF-8).  On OS/X systems, only UTF-8 encodings are allowed in
filenames.  Windows has its own set of restrictions.  

Fixing this to work "everywhere" and still be able to retain backwards
compatibility with existing sites is going to take a _huge_ amount of
work, which is why it'll happen after the 2.2.0 release (and likely
as a 2.3.0 release).

> IMO the i18n download should be split in languages. Most people don't 
> want to have all translations. It's larger than PmWiki itself...

As mentioned before -- I have plans to do this but just haven't
had time to go through all of the details yet.

> When is the archive updated? The current version is dated 2006-08-07.

I haven't updated the archive because I need to come up with a bunch
of bundling scripts to build the separate archives.  See the note
about "available time" above.  :-) :-)

> How are version dependencies (PmWiki version <-> i18n version) 
> handled?

AFAIK there shouldn't be many serious version dependencies, at least
not to the non-beta distributions.

> Who selects which pages go to the i18n distribution? A quick look 
> showed nonsense pages in the PmWikiDe group like Glück, Heute, 
> Meineseite, AttachJojobaöl, TEST...

Whatever shows up in the per-language directories on pmwiki.org
is what ends up in the distribution.  If pages don't belong, then
someone (who understands the language) needs to fix that for me.

> After all, I would be happy with a German user interface for writers, 
> but stay with the English pages for administration and more advanced 
> topics. There certainly is a tradeoff between comfort and accuracy, 
> so from a certain level, I would prefer the English documentation 
> source.

My policy has been that whoever does the translating gets to decide
what belongs and what doesn't, and how it should be organized.  :-)


> The German "StandDerÜbersetzung" page already has a flag for the 
> audience (user, admin, system administration), what about moving this 
> information to page text variables?

That's has some possibility, although some of the pages have
different sections targeting different audiences.

Pm



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