[jbosstools-dev] Internationalising JBoss Tools

Hi all, I've been working on a solution that would make it easy for the Red Hat L10n team to translate JBoss Tools and then include the translations in JBoss Tools. I now think that we do need file conversion as part of the build. To avoid the problem of conflicting translations, I would recommend that all translations apart from English live as PO files in the source tree, and their .properties will only be generated as build/runtime artifacts. The generated .properties files /could/ be stored in the source tree for convenience if preferred, but in any case I think it's best that all edits happen in the PO files. I did consider converting from properties to PO, so that we could have only properties files in the source tree, not POT/PO, but properties files don't contain important metadata which is available in PO files and used by translators to manage workflow, re-use translations, verify that MessageFormat strings haven't been broken, etc. And remember, you can't even put Unicode characters in a .properties file without using native2ascii or a special editor. With PO, you can use a special Gettext editor if you like, but PO is perfectly happy to be UTF-8, and editable with any text editor. I have created a pure Java Ant task (prop2pot) which can generate (from the English .properties files in the source tree) the translation templates (POT) to give to Red Hat's L10n team. The L10n team would then translate the POT files into PO files which contain the translations. I have another task po2prop which can generate .properties files from PO files, but I'm still working on po2frag, which will package .properties files as plugin fragments, to use as language packs. I have a kludgy shell script which seems to work, but it really needs to be pure Java if it's going to be part of the build. I would appreciate some help with making the Java version less kludgy, since I'm quite new to OSGi bundles. Regards Sean. -- Sean Flanigan Senior Software Engineer Engineering - Internationalisation Red Hat