[josm-dev] Translation of Plugins

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Fri, 5 Sep 2014, Paul Wölfel wrote:

> yes I know you prefer SVN, but SVN does not fit my needs. That's the reason why the plugin is on github.

Everything has advantages and disadvantages.

> I read the readme file, but it's not very verbose.

Short description:

After doing the normal gettext translations steps with pot, po, ... simply 
call the i18n.pl script like this:

./i18n.pl <targetdir> <po-files...>

Result will be the .lang files. You always need to install the english one 
and additional the other languages.

> So you don't want any other users to translate JOSM or it's plugins??

Well. Translation infrastructure is pretty standard except the file format 
as described above. But managing translations is a lot of work. For the 
SVN this is automated. We don't support other ways in detail, everybody 
needs to care for it himself or improve the documentation and scripts 
himself.

> I think how to translate should not be related on where it is hosted. If it's easy to translate maybe more people would help to translate.

Translation is more about infrastructure than about the possibility in 
code. We did setup infrastructure for the JOSM SVN's.

> I found out how to generate the required files, but how do I edit them? 
> I want my plugin to be as easy to use as possible and that includes 
> localization. Shouldn't there be a guide for a plugin developer to 
> translate their on plugin?

Which files? Po files are simple text. The lang files are direct binary 
conversion of the po files (we use own .lang instead of standard .mo as 
the results are much smaller which matters for a download tool).

The gettext system is standard in open source software. We wont document 
this.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)