Re: reworking sysinst: A Lua based msg system

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2012 at 12:45:18PM +0100, Marc Balmer wrote:
> >> Message catalogs
> >>
> >>    Messages are organized in message catalogs, one catalog per language.
> >> Once a language has been selected by the users, only that message
> >> catalog is used.  Message catalogs are Lua tables and a Lua script can
> >> add its messages by calling the msg() function:
> >>
> >> msg('english', {greeting = 'Hello', monday = 'Monday'})
> >> msg('german', {greeting = 'Guten Tag', monday = 'Montag'})
> > 
> > Messages are data, not program code - keep them separate.
> 
> Message _are_ data.  They are organized in Lua tables, the msg()
> function takes such a table and adds it to the respective language
> message catalog (stuff in {} is a Lua table).  Keep in mind that Lua was
> designed as a data description language and has a powerful syntax for that.

I guess what martin means here is that the message catalogs should not be
inside LUA scripts, but in separate files (just as they are now). Then
a module can add a new file to the already existing message table
(like msg('/path/to/module/messages.catalog')). Maybe msg() should then
try to load the message.catalog for the current language, as well as
the english one for fallback.

> 
> > 
> > How do you identify messages in your code? By index?
> 
> By index:
> 
> msg('english', { monday = 'Monday'})
> 
> msg_display(_M.monday)

BTW, should a module be allowed to overwrite an existing index ?
or maybe each module should have its own namespace ?

> [...]
> > 
> >  - there needs to be an easy method to query all the tables for missing
> >    translations for a give language, i.e. something like 
> > 
> >     make list-missing-translations LANG=de
> > 
> >    and it would print the identification and english text of all messages
> >    that have no german translation yet
> 
> That could probably be done in sysinst itself.

I don't think a translator should have to build a run sysinst to find this.
This should be available as a host tool.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--