[vlc-devel] [PATCH] Lua: new script Allocine (France)

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

   Hello,

On Friday 03 February 2012, Rafaël Carré wrote:
> Le 2010-06-02 15:22, Jean-Philippe André a écrit :
> > This extension is in French only.
> 
> This seems to confuse people using non french locale as reported by a
> brazilian translator on IRC.

IMHO, extensions should not be in tarballs and binaries of VLC at all. Last 
time I tried, it was not particularly nice to use (as a French speaker). And 
anyway, official UI features are best implemented in the UI directly. Indeed, I 
do not remember the original synchronization and thread bugs in the extensions 
support ever getting fixed, so using Qt must be better.

Besides, I do not see why this particular extension would deserve to be in 
vlc.git unless there were a partnership contract with Allociné, of which I am 
not aware.

> Some work was done on translating http interfaces but I am not sure what
> can be done for lua.

Seriously, the PO files are big, really big, too big. (For the most part, this 
comes from the thousands of obscure options in the hundreds of plugins, but it 
also comes from lack of rationalization. Some day, someone ought to write a 
script to find similar but different translations to ease rationalization...)

Anyway, covering extensions in the vlc text domain is a bad idea: it worses 
the problem. And in any case, it would never work for unofficial and/or external 
extensions. For external plugins, we already have a way to define a different 
(get)text domain. If we want to expose gettext to external LUA scripts, then 
that is needed in LUA too. I am however not convinced that gettext is the best 
choice to localize extensions. Exposing the ISO language code only and letting 
the extensions deal with localization all by themselves is probably simpler.

> Querying the locale from .lua code and having the .lua scripts use the
> translation if available?

> That could duplicate translating effort since the translations would be
> separate from .po though.

This is unavoidable.

> 
> > A german version may appear soon.
> > ---
> > 
> >  share/lua/extensions/allocine-fr.lua |  300
> >  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 files changed, 300 insertions(+),
> >  0 deletions(-)
> >  create mode 100644 share/lua/extensions/allocine-fr.lua
> 
> Why do we ship this in VLC builds?
> 
> It should be available on addons.videolan.org and I am not sure if it
> should be in vlc.git

I am quite sure if should not.

Its quality is not yet on par with the rest of the player, and the French 
language will be confusing for most users.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.info