RE: GNATS help needed

[Micone, Andrew (Manpower Contract)]

I can't say what you could do to recover, but I can give you some localization 
advice. As far as I understand it, and I've had good success with customizing 
GNATS, it only supports basic ASCII in its data files and doesn't have any 
localization support. That doesn't mean you couldn't localize it, I've 
localized worse (i.e. printer firmware). If you were going to localize it, a 
generic localization approach would be:

A) Use the field names as keys to a string resource database and map them to 
localized string displays in the user-interface. So don't change "Closed-Date" 
to something else, leave it as-is and then map it to its german string through 
a lookup table and some additional user-interface code.

B) You would need to check over the I/O and indexing routines to make sure they 
can support the character set you are using. You could do this in increasingly 
levels of complexity by either  kludging your character set into ASCII with 
escape codes, programming support for eight-bit character sets (I think most 
european languages can be handled in eight bits), or go all out and change it 
so that it supports unicode strings opaquely. GNATS expects mail-like messages. 
If you look at how file attachments are handled, they are converted into 
something that looks like uuencoded ASCII. You would need to do something 
similair with foreign character sets, especially if you wanted to do it right 
by using Unicode.

Anyway, not having explored the code in too much depth, that's my $0.02 USD. 


Andy Micone
Performance Engineer / Process Lead
Performance R&D
(208) 396-4228 address@hidden

-----Original Message-----
From: Leu, Fa. PostDirekt MA [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 8:04 AM
To: 'address@hidden'
Subject: GNATS help needed


Hi,

i am trying to customize and translate GNATS to have a German User Interface. 
After serveral good iterations i'am stuck - since i've changed the field 
"Closed-Date" 
send-pr won't do anything anymore and gnatsweb returns "unparseable reply from 
gnatsd:" (without a reply) in the directory gnats-adm a file "gnats.lock" is 
created. I've undone my changes but get still the same result.  

1. What can i do to recover. 
2. Is a translation generally possible (may be there are hardcoded fieldnames, 
etc)


many thanks in advance

Hans-Jörg Leu 



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