[Po4a-devel] OS X .strings support

[Yavor Doganov]

Aiet Kolkhi wrote:
> But I may have misunderstood po4a concept.

I think so.

GNU gettext already provides everything needed; see
/usr/share/doc/gettext-doc/examples/hello-objc-gnustep/.  However, I'm
not sure if you can hook the build machinery for a typical Muck OS
app.  I've never seen it used in GNUstep packages either, which is a
real pity.  Maintaining translations in .strings files is a pain,
terrible pain.

What's worse and makes l10n suck big time for GNUstep/Cocoa is the
usage of .gorm/.nib/.xib files which you have to edit with gorm.app
and often resize/adjust for different languages and fonts (ugh!).
Modern versions of Gorm support extracting and importing strings
from/to .gorm/.nib files, but this is a manual operation that cannot
be performed within a makefile rule.  And then there are Renaissance's
.gsmarkup files which are XML, so you'd probably use intltool to
extract/merge the translatable strings (po4a's Xml module seems like
an overkill here).

Basically, it's a mess.  But if you manage to properly gettextize the
package and avoid .gorm files (which are an abomination for i10n in
any case), it should work without po4a's help at all.

Neil Williams wrote:
> If PO is so much better than .strings that a converter is desirable,
> I'd say to dump .strings completely and get the source code to use
> gettext.

This is absolutely impossible for NeXT/OpenStep/Cocoa/GNUstep
applications due to the API design.  (As a formal excuse for GNUstep
at least: The API was designed before the inception of gettext, and
because GNUstep strives for both OpenStep and Cocoa compatibility, it
has no choice but to follow that cripple.  Oh well, I guess I should
avoid using strong words here.  Many GNUsteppers, completely
surprisingly to me, actually like .strings files.)