[Potlatch-dev] i18n update

[Andy Allan]

Hi All,

Apologies for not having emailed about this earlier - it was something
I intended at the Hack Weekend but I didn't do so then.

The i18n framework (babelFx, previously known as l10n_injection) was
included in pre-2.0 builds, and some more work from the i18n branch
was merged in for the 2.0 release. So currently we have

* An i18n framework
* An improvement to the framework so that missing strings fall back to
the hard-coded default[1].
* A small number of strings translateable (~20) - mainly things that
you can see when first running p2, button labels and tooltips on the
toolbox
* A handful of translations - see l10n/locale/ in the code
* A method to control which translations are used e.g
fo.addVariable("locale", "de_DE")
* Some limited support in the rails_port for mapping browser languages
to flash locales

There's a number of outstanding issues
* There's a problem where the default locale bundle (en_US) isn't
being loaded, that was apparently fixed in babelFx but still doesn't
work for us.
* Reports of people seeing [Object object] in the GPS menu. Thinking
about it as I write, I wonder if it's because of the above.
* Nothing has been decided on translating the strings loaded from
config files, primarily map_features
* I've been (blindly) following the documentation about naming things
on their locale (e.g. es_US for spanish speakers who like their dates
displayed the wrong way round) but I'm not certain if that's the right
thing to do, since browsers only request languages not locales.

Moving on, we're aiming to get the actual translations done via
translatewiki, as per the other OSM projects. I've had a conversation
with them about it, and they say they want to see more of the i18n
work completed before they hook it up to their system, but otherwise
they are happy with the .properties file format. In other words, for
now, the translations we have are limited and are mainly for testing
whether the whole system works. If you want to translate p2 into your
own language then please wait until it's hooked up to translatewiki.
If you want to help that happen faster, that'll involve coding the
i18n stuff[2].

So that's it. If anyone has any questions please shout.

Cheers,
Andy

[1] I added this and it was accepted upstream, since we're never going
to have 100% translation unlike say in closed-source commercial
product releases.
[2] Which I currently don't have huge amounts of time to work on.