Subject: Re: Has anyone looked at Gettext support for Git itself?

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 17:03:15 -0700 (PDT)

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> I couldn't find anything about this in the list archives. Have there
> been any discussions of adding internationalization support to Git
> itself? I.e. the interface messages that the core Git utilities emit.
> 
> I tried to get started with integrating GNU Gettext, but gnuish
> assumptions it makes about building make it a bit hard.
> 
> Is there perhaps another gettext implementation that would be more
> suitable for Git?
> 
> I'd be interested in submitting patches to make the existing strings
> translatable if someone could get the tool + build skeleton going.

First, git uses multiple programming languages: you would need a
solution that would work for programs in C (gettext), for Perl
(Locale::Maketext or less known Data::Localize), probably for Python,
and what would probably give most problems for shell scripts.

Second, you would need to take care that changing locale wouldn't
break git.  It can be done either via setting LC_ALL=C in
git-sh-setup, or by translation only porcelain, and leaving plumbing
unchanged.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git