[MKDoc-modules] ANNOUNCE: i18nfool 0.1

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

What is it?
===========

Extract and manipulate ZPT I18N strings from internationalized ZPT/TAL 
templates.

I18NFool stands for "Internationalization File Object Oriented Leech". 
It inspects a list of internationalized templates and sucks out 
internationalized strings to produce a series of .pot files.

It also comes with a couple of shell scripts to easily manage a 
collection of .pot and .po files with the gettext tools.

It's designed to work with Petal and PHPTAL, which means it should work 
with ZPT as well.


How does it work?
=================

There are basically 3 scripts:


i18nfool-extract
----------------

To extract strings from your templates and produce a bunch of .pot files 
(one per domain):

     mkdir /opt/myapp/locale
     cd /opt/myapp/locale
     i18nfool-extract file1 file2 ... fileN

This will create

     /opt/myapp/locale/default.pot
     /opt/myapp/locale/some_domain.pot
     /opt/myapp/locale/some_other_domain.pot


i18nfool-update
---------------

To create a bunch of .po files or update existing .po files from the set 
of .pot files:

     cd /opt/myapp/locale

Create some target languages:

     mkdir en
     mkdir es
     mkdir fr

Run the script:

     i18nfool-update

This will create

     /opt/myapp/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/default.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/some_domain.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/some_other_domain.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/default.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/some_domain.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/some_other_domain.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/default.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/some_domain.po
     /opt/myapp/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/some_other_domain.po


i18nfool-build
--------------

Turns the .po files into .mo files.

     cd /opt/myapp/locale
     i18nfool-build

This will create

     /opt/myapp/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/default.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/some_domain.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/some_other_domain.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/default.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/some_domain.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/some_other_domain.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/default.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/some_domain.mo
     /opt/myapp/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/some_other_domain.mo


Motive
======

I've tried i18ndude but it's got a couple of crippling bugs at the 
moment. Apparently there's a i18n-extract.py somewhere with Zope 3 but 
having to download and setup Zope 3 just for this one tool is a bit of a 
drag.

I was on IRC today with the author of PHPTAL (a good friend of mine) and 
he had basically the same issues... so in a joint effort, we wrote this 
new tool.

I hope it will complement nicely other similar tools. Bug reports are 
very welcome.

It fully supports namespaces and translation domains.

     perl -MCPAN -e 'install I18NFool'

Should pull out the module and any required dependencies for you 
automatically though.


Caveats & Limitations
=====================

At the moment, i18nfool doesn't make any assumption about the character 
set and is character set agnostic. Hopefully it'll be a bit more refined 
at that level in the future.


Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Jean-Michel.