Re: Before l10n, better practices for (message) ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com>]

> On May 25, 2017, at 7:09, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 05/24/2017 12:12 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> He most probably wanted to point out that any infrastructure of
>> this kind should at least consider using gettext, if not actually use
>> it.
> 
> There is no point to straightening up strings if we don't have a translation infrastructure.

As the title suggests I was talking about better practices for UI messages regardless of whether we do l10n or not.
i18n and l10n are one thing, but having manageable strings that don't generate grammatical errors because developers consider elisp as a macro language for Natural Languages is a different thing.

It is not even a chicken and egg situation. Fixing strings and setting rules for developers will benefit all users right now. And we can also work on i18n, which is a totally different thing and requires a skill set that I'm pretty sure I don't have right now (while figuring out what a complex concat does is reasonably within what I can do right now).

> In contrast, it would be helpful to have the infrastructure even if some strings still need straightening up, because the other strings will be translated.

It would be helpful to have a lot of things. But l10n has been discussed for a while here and nobody is working on it as far as I can tell.

> This suggests that we should focus our initial efforts on getting the infrastructure up, and worry about straightening up strings later. That is why I suggested gettext in response to your question about where we should start.

No, this suggests that if you're interested in leading the i18n efforts, you can go ahead.

And as I just wrote to Eli, I'm fine with helping in that area but there are people who are much more qualified in terms of experience with Emacs and Elisp. My priority right now is to learn about Emacs and Elisp while helping where I can, and that does not include creating a full i18n infrastructure on my own.

Jean-Christophe