Re: Emacs i18n

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Second, I don't understand why we are still talking about 'message'.
  > Most of the user interaction in Emacs that will benefit the most from
  > translation is not messages we show in the echo area: Emacs actually
  > doesn't chatter there too much.  Most of the stuff that IMO is much
  > more important to have translated are the doc strings.

I think it would be most natural to handle doc strings through
a special mechanism.  We have already had special mechanisms
for them -- I don't know whether we still do.  But it is easy
for the compiler to find them all and put them in a file
for translations.

   > . Do we use a separate message catalog for each Lisp package, or a
   >   single catalog for all of Emacs?  Each alternative has its merits
   >   and demerits.  For example, if we go with separate catalogs, then
   >   how do we make the correct bindtextdomain call, given that packages
   >   call each other?

I think they have to be separate, and we can use something like
lexical binding to specify the right one for each file.

This is worth a special mechamism for.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)