Re: Configure.help i18n system

[GOTO Masanori]

At Thu, 7 Jun 2001 14:01:53 -0700 (PDT),
Linus Torvalds <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Keitaro Yosimura wrote:
> > 
> > Configure.help i18n system is the thing which uses MD5 SUM of the text
> > of the text as a key, and calls suitable data to the present language
> > setup (it judges from an environment variable).

I'm one of members to maintain one version of the Japanese Configure.help.
I also sent this question to Linus who coming in Japan, he denied this idea...

IMHO, using environment variable is not adequate; national language
designation should be set to the make option. The behavior of make
config must not be influenced by such a LANG environment variable.
You might concern about displaying national language character
(because it depends on the LANG variables), but it have merely
relations to `i18n text'.

> I suspect that this is actually something that intersects with the i18n
> work: how does the i18n projects distribute the actual help texts? Done
> right, maybe the same distributed environment could be used for
> everything, and getting Configure.help entirely out of the "core kernel"
> tree, and into a separate distribution (where the English version would be
> just one among many distributions).

Current distribution to the i18n texts are all outside from the core kernel...

BTW, i18n Configure.help needs `quality assuarance' because in English
all developers can recognize whether help text is correct or
not. However, i18n text can read for only each national people, so
developers cannot know about these correctness.  From this point of
view, I agree with Linus's comments because of this concerns.

But, there are some version of i18n Configure.help translations.
What a waste to make them sleep...

Regards,
-- GOTO Masanori