Introducing MoManager

I am very mindful of the unsatisfactory situation with internationalization of Puppy. We have guys in the past who have done translations but they never made it into later Puppy builds.

Also, there hasn't been a consistent methodology, so developers have tended to do bits of translation here and there.

What we need is a single tool, a GUI application, that someone can use to completely translate Puppy to their language. Furthermore, that tool must produce translations that can readily be sent to me for inclusion in Woof and to the maintainers of packages.

This is a magical tool, and I am dreaming somewhat, but I have made a start, it is named MoManager.

As we now have a huge number of scripts in Woof (as well as in many PET packages) that use the 'gettext' translation method, this is what I have implemented for the first release of MoManager. This is a one-stop-shop for creating and maintaining translations for all the gettext'ed scripts in Puppy.

To use MoManager, you really need to be running a Puppy built from the very latest Woof that I have just uploaded. This has the big collection of gettext'ed scripts created by rodin.s and myself (mostly rodin.s) -- and importantly, each script has a unique TEXTDOMAIN, which is what MoManager requires.

MoManager will not only allow you to create new translations but also edit existing ones -- and synchronise with the latest script. And it is all done in GUI windows, clicking buttons, no need to type commands.

Note that translations are to be kept in Woof (and in PET packages) as .mo files. .po files are not required.

I have updated the Internationalization HOWTO with information on MoManager:
http://bkhome.org/fossil/woof2.cgi/artifact/60cd815002b4de659f1c37459b4974512793a015

Woof commit:
http://bkhome.org/fossil/woof2.cgi/info/6e0f3af7f1

There are probably going to be some people keen to use this, so I will do a build of Wary or Racy in a few days.

Tomorrow I intend to start extending MoManager a bit, probably add management of non-English entries for the menu and for ROX-Filer. I haven't thought about integrating t12s'ed scripts into it yet.

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Comments

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Re Curses
Username: BarryK
"I know that could be a problem, but then we do have "peer review". I build an alpha-Puppy, the testers look at it, if there is a joker out there who has submitted inappropriate translations we would soon know. We would accumulate a list of trusted translators -- well, we already have a small list of guys that we trust for de, ru , jp, etc.

Tags: woof