Present Perfect

gettext

Spent the whole day getting very familiar with gettext. I wanted to make a sample module that used it all the way down in all the ways we will need for GStreamer. I had looked at David's i18n stuff in GStreamer, but it looks to be a half-finished job so I'm assuming he gave up.

My goals were

• integrate it with autogen.sh like the other autotools

• do a minimum amount of tweaking, and clearly separate the tweaking from the generated files

• figure out how to update all of the stuff in po/

I made a sample tarball that works out well. I learnt about autopoint too, which treats me a lot better than gettextize has. The sample is in CVS, in autostars CVS. It'll take some days to show up, what with SF's bad anoncvs lag.

I'm starting to wonder about the necessity of glib-gettextize though. Maybe it's time to kill it off.

Also, it's wonderful when you mail someone you think will never mail you back (In this case, Bruno Haible, the gettext maintainer) and you get a reply back in two hours. That's a lot quicker than I myself tend to reply to things.

Linux

Talking to Matthias a few days ago made me remember how I got into Linux. I used to program C in DOS using the trusty Microsoft C 6.0. I think I had a copy that came on 6 1.2 MB disks, and I had it installed on my 20 MB HD. The second disk contained the IDE, but it had a data error on it, so it was a very crashy affair for me. So I never had much else than EDIT.com as the editor and the DOS prompt to compile stuff :)

Anyway, when it was time to do my graduation thesis, I wanted to do a programming one again, but I didn't feel like learning Windows-based programming. I was still stuck in the DOS age. So at the university we had gotten used to the Solaris servers for programming tasks, and then someone told me about Linux and how it was similar.

So I installed Linux just to have something that looked like a DOS box :)

When today I look at my purty GUI GNOME desktop, programming a lot better and easier than back in those days, I'm very happy I made the right decision for the wrongest of reasons...

Now Playing

Been listening to The Blue Nile *all day* and still don't get tired of it. This album took about four years to grow on me, but its simplicity and mastery stands out.

gettext Spent the whole day getting very familiar with gettext. I wanted to make a sample module that used it all the way down in all the ways we will...