[gentoo-dev] News item: LINGUAS USE_EXPAND renamed to L10N

[Mart Raudsepp]

First draft of news item for proceeding with LINGUAS USE_EXPAND rename
to L10N independently of the INSTALL_MASK feature additions.

I hope English natives will improve the sentence flow and grammar here
:)
Perhaps there's also a better title than with the technical USE_EXPAND
mention.


Title: LINGUAS USE_EXPAND renamed to L10N
Author: Mart Raudsepp <leio@g.o>
Content-Type: text/plain
Posted: 2016-06-06
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 1.0

The LINGUAS USE_EXPAND has been renamed to L10N, to avoid a conceptual
clash with the standard gettext LINGUAS behaviour.
L10N controls which extra localization support will be installed.
This is usually used in case of extra downloads of language packs.

If you have set LINGUAS in your make.conf, you should either copy or
rename it to L10N, depending on if you want to filter the supported
languages at build time or not via the gettext LINGUAS environment
variable behaviour as described below. Note that this filtering does not
affect only installed gettext catalog files (*.mo), but also lines of
translations in an always shipped file (e.g *.desktop).

LINGUAS maintains the standard gettext behaviour and will now work as
expected with all package managers. It controls which language
translations are built and installed. An unset value means all
available, an empty value means none, and a value can be an unordered
list of gettext language codes, with or without country codes.
Usually only two letter language codes suffice, but can be limited with
country codes with a 'll_CC' formatting, where 'll' is the language code
and 'CC' is the country code, e.g en_GB. Some rare languages also have
three letter language codes.
If you want English with a set LINGUAS, it is suggested to list it with
the desired country code, in case the default is not the usual en_US.
It is also common to list "en" then, in case a package is natively
written in a different language, but does provide an English translation
for whichever country.
A list of LINGUAS language codes is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Language-Codes

Note that LINGUAS affects build time, and thus filters what ends up
in binary packages. If you are building generic binary packages that
should support all available language, you should not set LINGUAS.

If you have per-package customizations of LINGUAS USE_EXPAND, you
should also rename those from LINGUAS to L10N. This typically means
renaming linguas_* to l10n_*.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Localization/Guide has also been updated
to reflect this change.