On Tuesday 07 December 2010, Rolf Ahrenberg wrote:

On Mon, 6 Dec 2010, Ville Skyttä wrote:

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On Saturday 04 December 2010, Tobias Grimm wrote:

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The gettext version I use automatically adds a Language field to the headers of the po-Files. It would be nice to have this field there in the first place, so here's a small patch that adds it.

The Language fields for the main dialect of a language should not have _COUNTRY (i.e. Language: de, not Language: de_DE etc). More info: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Header-Entry

"Fill in the language code of the language. This can be in ONE of three forms: ‘ll’, ‘ll_CC’, ‘ll_CC@variant’"

Where is the country code forbidden exactly?

Don't stop reading there. I don't know about forbidden, but they do write that the value "is" something else, a bit below the above quoted part:

"The naming convention ‘ll_CC’ is also the way locales are named on systems based on GNU libc. But there are three important differences:

* In this PO file field, but not in locale names, ‘ll_CC’ combinations denoting a language's main dialect are abbreviated as ‘ll’. For example, ‘de’ is equivalent to ‘de_DE’ (German as spoken in Germany), and ‘pt’ to ‘pt_PT’ (Portuguese as spoken in Portugal) in this context. * In this PO file field, suffixes like ‘.encoding’ are not used. * In this PO file field, variant designators that are not relevant to message translation, such as ‘@euro’, are not used.

So, if your locale name is ‘de_DE.UTF-8’, the language specification in PO files is just ‘de’."

The core VDR doesn't have same language for different areas, but i.e. the femon does: "zh_CN" and "zh_TW". If I would use the plain "zh" for both of these, the "zh_TW.po" file would be interpreted as "zh_CN" and that really doesn't sound rigth.

But leaving out the country only applies to _the_ (there can be only one I gather) primary dialect of a language. So both zh_CN and zh_TW cannot be the primary dialect; dunno if there's such a thing for Chinese in the first place. If you look at my patch carefully, you'll see that for zh_CN.po the value of the Language field is zh_CN.

I did not invent any of these values myself - I just first fixed the Language- Team fields so that gettext itself understands them, and then ran the files through gettext, and copied/included in my patch what gettext itself had added.

With VDR's current language files this doesn't make any difference, but I prefer Tobias' patch with your language team modifications a bit more future proof.

I think following what gettext's docs say/recommend and what it actually does itself is the best approach.