Sunday, 25 March 2012

FatMessages - front end maintainers, please read!

We're moving towards keeping just one messages file checked into version
control that contains all messages for all front end and language
combinations, and then split things up at build time. This should both
help to keep languages in sync as well as reduce the amount of messages
data each front end has to load. (ie, there's a lot of GTK- and RISC
OS-specific stuff in there at the moment.)

There is now netsurf/resources/FatMessages, which is processed by
netsurf/utils/split-messages.pl, which can be called like this:

./utils/split-messages.pl en gtk < resources/FatMessages

This will output to stdout all the messages that are relevent to the GTK
front end in English. 'fr ro' for French RISC OS, 'nl ami' for Dutch
AmigaOS, etc.

Messages with a platform 'all' get emitted for all platforms. And
here's the problem. I managed to automate the appropriate tagging of
platform-specific messages for some things (such as the GTK messages, or
RISC OS interactive help), but a lot of stuff isn't namespaced
helpfully.

Can people please go through netsurf/resources/FatMessages and change
the prefixes appropriately if they know a message is used only by a
specific front end. For example, there's a lot of stuff there that
looks like it's only used by the RISC OS front end for its menu
construction, but I don't know if some other platform makes use of them.
(I suppose we could always suck it and see.)

Ta.
B.

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