[Qemu-devel] Translation of strings in QEMU w/ gettext ?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

In my work on TLS encryption, I've been blindly adding gettext markers
around all error messages I raise. eg error_setg(errp, _("foo bar"));
I've done this out of habit, since most apps I work on translate all
strings that could end up visible by a user.

Looking again at existing QEMU codebase though, I notice that adding
gettext _("...") markers is the exception, not the rule.

$ git grep  -l '_("'
disas/alpha.c
disas/arm.c
disas/i386.c
disas/m68k.c
disas/mips.c
disas/ppc.c
disas/sparc.c
scripts/dump-guest-memory.py
tcg/s390/tcg-target.c
tcg/sparc/tcg-target.h
ui/gtk.c

Also, there are no .po file translations in QEMU source.

So I'm wondering if there is a long term vision / desire for translation
in QEMU or not ?

In a number of cases libvirt includes the error message from QMP in the
message we pass back up to the user. Any errors from libvirt are always
translated, so if running libvirt in a non-en_US locale currently you
will get a translated message from libvirt which includes a bit english
text from QEMU.

Also, with the GTK ui frontend of QEMU now, you'll get some translation
of the user interface menu options thanks to GTK built-in translations,
but the rest are still english, which is not very satisfactory either.

Should we accept and/or encourage new patches to include translation
markers, or should we explicitly say we're never going to translate any
of QEMU and remove existing _("...") usage in the code ?

I've got a bunch of patches which add _("...") and want to know whether
to remove them from my new code....

Regards,
Daniel
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