Re: ircd i18n, suggested protocol extension

[Per von Zweigbergk <cannon@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 01:39:55PM +0100, Bobby Billingsley wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Per von Zweigbergk wrote:
> 
> > That's why I thought of sending a LANG message before sending the PING. An
> > i18n-supporting IRC client would respond to the LANG before responding to
> > the PING, but an older client would just ignore the LANG and just reply to
> > the PING and defualt to English.
> > 
> > Any ideas on this approach? Except that it's a bit of work, that is.
> 
> Wouldn't http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/gettext.html on the client side
> be more appropriate?

The problem with using gettext is that it expects text strings exactly
as they are.

You'd have to account for IRC servings modifying their texts to remotely
amusing or non-standard texts in English, like that on DalNet.

Also, if it was i18nized at the IRC server level, work wouldn't have to
be duplicated for i18n of replies in other clients. They would just
have to reply to a LANG request and presto, most of the IRC server
text is translated.

Sure, you could do this with numerics already, but how good is that?
The numerics namespace isn't centrally controlled. Earlier on this
list there was someone who commented on one particular horrible
numberic that could mean four(!) different things depending on what
IRC server it was.

This is the elimination of work duplication which is all that Free
Software is about anyway. Sure, the work would have to be duplicated
over several IRC server platforms, but there are less widely deployed IRC
server softwares than there are widely used IRC clients. And of course,
less work in maintenance on the IRC clients.

I'm willing to look at the ircd code and see what has to be done to
i18n it. It should only be to dig out all character array constats and
replace that with a call to something similar to GNU gettext, or even
GNU gettext itself.

As for IRC clients, the changes would be trivial, and feasible in
under 20 lines of code (even that would be bloated) unless the client
is extremely poorly designed.

-- 
Per von Zweigbergk <pvz@xxxxxxxx>
IRC: pv2b (IRCNet or QuakeNet)

War does not determine who's right, war determines who's left.