Looking for people's experience with po files.

[Michael Pelletier]

As I see it, the key advantage you'd have in converting this Bash script to
gettext() is the fact that it's a uniform approach to internationalization
that's well-understood by software developers involved in multi-lingual
code.  So rather than some poor fellow five years from now having to figure
out and maintain the script's ad-hoc and likely arcane and suboptimal
implementation, standard tools and procedures can be used.

It'd be a bit of a project to reimpliment the multi-lingual operation of a
10k-line script, but worthwhile in the long run if the lifetime of this
script stretches into the foreseeable future.  You could probably write a
Perl script to do most of the conversion for you, for that matter.

	-Michael Pelletier.

-----Original Message-----
From: gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org
[mailto:gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Steven W. Orr
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 11:06 AM
To: GNHLUG
Subject: Looking for people's experience with po files.

I understand the purpose of po files but I've never used it. I'm currently
working on a bash script that's ~10k lines long. It needs to support
multiple languages and right now we have a set of .lang files that just
define duplicate variables. e.g.

Filename		Content
lang/English		symbol1=Hello
lang/German		symbol1='Guten Tag'

I'm thinking there's gotta be something better. Are po files inappropriate
for this? Anyone?