Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Cc: pr@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] News item: LINGUAS USE_EXPAND renamed to L10N
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2016 22:18:22
Message-Id: 22375.6686.845588.883995@a1i15.kph.uni-mainz.de
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] News item: LINGUAS USE_EXPAND renamed to L10N by Mart Raudsepp
1 >>>>> On Mon, 06 Jun 2016, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
2
3 > First draft of news item for proceeding with LINGUAS USE_EXPAND rename
4 > to L10N independently of the INSTALL_MASK feature additions.
5
6 > I hope English natives will improve the sentence flow and grammar here
7 > :)
8 > Perhaps there's also a better title than with the technical USE_EXPAND
9 > mention.
10
11 Since I've seen no objections against using BCP 47 (aka IETF language
12 tags) for L10N, find my attempt of an updated wording below.
13
14 Ulrich
15
16
17 Title: L10N USE_EXPAND variable replacing LINGUAS
18 Author: Mart Raudsepp <leio@g.o>
19 Author: Ulrich Müller <ulm@g.o>
20 Content-Type: text/plain
21 Posted: 2016-06-19
22 Revision: 1
23 News-Item-Format: 1.0
24
25 The L10N variable is replacing LINGUAS as an USE_EXPAND, to avoid a
26 conceptual clash with the standard gettext LINGUAS behaviour.
27
28 L10N controls which extra localization support will be installed.
29 This is commonly used for downloads of additional language packs.
30
31 If you have set LINGUAS in your make.conf, you most likely want to add
32 its entries also to L10N. Note that while the common two letter language
33 codes (like "de" or "fr") are identical, more complex entries have a
34 different syntax because L10N now uses IETF language tags. (For example,
35 "pt_BR" becomes "pt-BR" and "sr@latin" becomes "sr-Latn".) You can look
36 up the available codes in profiles/desc/l10n.desc in the gentoo tree.
37 A detailed description of language tags (aka BCP 47) can be found at:
38 https://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/
39
40 After a transition time for packages to be converted, the LINGUAS
41 environment variable will maintain the standard gettext behaviour and
42 will work as expected with all package managers. It controls which
43 language translations are built and installed. An unset value means all
44 available, an empty value means none, and a value can be an unordered
45 list of gettext language codes, with or without territory codes. Usually
46 two letter language codes suffice, but can be narrowed down by territory
47 codes with a "ll_CC" formatting, where "ll" is the language code and
48 "CC" is the territory code, e.g., "en_GB". Some rare languages also have
49 three letter language codes. Note that LINGUAS does not only affect
50 installed gettext catalog files (*.mo), but also lines of translations
51 in an always shipped file (e.g., *.desktop).
52
53 If you want English with a set LINGUAS, it is suggested to list it with
54 the desired country code, in case the default is not the usual "en_US".
55 It is also common to list "en" then, in case a package is natively
56 written in a different language, but does provide an English translation
57 for whichever country. A list of LINGUAS language codes is available at:
58 http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Language-Codes
59
60 If you have per-package customizations of the LINGUAS USE_EXPAND, you
61 should also rename those. This typically means changing linguas_* to
62 l10n_*, and possibly updating the syntax as described above.
63
64 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Localization/Guide has also been updated to
65 reflect this change.