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

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

> On May 27, 2017, at 4:00, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Why not hide all this ugliness inside 'message'?

I agree. We need to hide the l10n selection/display mechanism inside the string display functions in a transparent way so that developers *just* have to be reasonably careful with the strings they build (and we can provide guidance for the strings, or even correct them if necessary).

My very uninformed idea is that we need an independent function that handles the preferred language check and the catalog parsing based on a key, and all the string displaying functions (message etc) would be redefined to call that function when a non default preferred langage (currently English) is detected.

The only "extra burden" for the developers would be to specify the file default language somewhere in their code. Currently it would be set to English. But we can imagine developers working only "locally" and using native strings, and when l10n versions are provided (for ex from Japanese to English) the display would also provide the English for English readers, for ex.

Jean-Christophe