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Sorry about the label. I know it sucks.

The encoding issues with our CD database have improved and we a new patch to fix it (although it may not always be great for data that we already have). That said, our shipping company (which does not use Ubuntu and probably not even GNU/Linux) cannot support any non-ASCII characters (and there are other similar restrictions). If this were the major criteria in choosing places to ship to, we'd be screwed. This will always be a bit nasty. We also started collecting data for the CDs before we had chosen a company to ship or knew the restrictions.

In terms of localization stuff, I'm happy to work with you to file bugs and to chase up on these things. Let me know: mako@canonical.com

-- Benjamin Mako Hill
— Posted by mako at Fri Dec 3 18:00:23 2004

Firefox does not need recompilation to be localized. Just install one of the XPIs from here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0/linux-i686/xpi/

and then run:

firefox -UILocale <language code> -contentLocale <country code>

e.g.:

firefox -UILocale pt-BR -contentLocale BR

for Brazilian Portuguese.
— Posted by marcoos at Sun Dec 5 07:09:25 2004

Marcoos, you're not the first one to point that out: my wording was probably not very good.

I know that Firefox doesn't require recompilation, my point was on "OOo vs Gnumeric/Abiword" and "Firefox vs Epiphany" when I said "similar": it's similar in that no one will ship Firefox or OOo translated to as many languages as they are.

Simply, GNOME apps are better at localisation (they're not perfect).
— Posted by Данило at Sun Dec 5 13:02:41 2004

Are they better?

I have not seen many GNOME apps that can change languages on the fly, nor offer the user to select the default locale for running it.

Granted, Mozilla things are messy to translate by hand, but luckily there is http://translate.sf.net that converts between Mozilla and .po formats. It also handles some other strange l10n file formats (strange being same as: not (n)gettext).

One bug however is that it does not support UTF-8 shortcut keys, at least it did not until a few days ago when I last looked at it. But, it's python and the only changes needed are to construct the UTF-8 strings instead of plain ones.

I just did not have the time to hunt these places down.

f
— Posted by filmil at Wed Dec 8 23:23:04 2004

Filip, what applications do allow changing language on the fly? If you've got to use different shared libraries (as in OOo), you certainly must reload the app itself as well.

I don't know about Firefox, but I suspect you got to restart it as well.  I know it's true for installing a locale at least.

Adding an option for default locale-per-app is something that's unnecessary: you can create eg. "gnumeric" bash script which will do simply "LC_ALL=blah_BLAH LANG=blah gnumeric-bin $*", and move "gnumeric" binary to "gnumeric-bin". Nobody bothers with this because (almost) nobody needs it and it's really trivial to do if one insists, and if you want, you may also create a GConf key and read and write it with gconftool-2 from within such Bash script as well.


One can create GNOME applications which would support changing a locale on the fly, but programmers usually optimise by assuming that that won't happen (i.e. you can do char *bla = g_strdup(gettext("This message")); once in your program, instead of doing it whenever you're displaying the message).

Now, if programmers didn't optimise this way, you'd be able to even install a locale on the fly and use that (you can already write a wrapper library around gettext() to check for changes to some GConf key "/desktop/currentlanguage", and load it using LD_PRELOAD mechanism, but few really need that).

Some Gnome applications would really benefit from this once "Language and Culture" capplet hits the shelves (most notably gnome-session, gnome-panel, nautilus, gnome-applets, since they're loaded on startup; yet, all of them can be simply reloaded for changes to take effect [SIGHUP], except for gnome-session which might end your X session). But technically, if there're not too many optimisations as above, you can already make it mostly (there're many areas where it will fail) work without touching Gnome code itself.

But, it's going to be slower, and nobody likes slower!
— Posted by Данило at Thu Dec 9 15:29:48 2004