[ClusterLabs] Antw: [EXT] Re: Feedback wanted: Native language support for Pacemaker help output

[Chris Lumens]

>I think the use case is where senior admins can do what you're talking
>about, but less-experienced admins need to run cluster commands
>occasionally.

Having previously worked on a project that had translations, maybe my
experiences will be useful.

First, pacemaker does a lot of things with strings that would have to be
changed to make it translatable.  Every non-logging use of
pcmk__plural_s would have to be gotten rid of.  Anywhere that we built
up a string from pieces (like with g_string_append) would have to be
changed to do it all at once.  Otherwise, translators are not going to
have the context to know what they are translating.

If we wanted to be really professional, the second thing we would need
to do would be build into our release schedule a string freeze, which is
a date after which no translatable strings can be modified by the
developers.  This gives the translators time to catch up and have things
finished before release.

Third, we would need to ensure that our release workflow involved
pulling those translated strings from wherever.  We'd want to add that
to our docs, etc.  This isn't big, it's just something we'd need to
remember to do.

Fourth, keeping translators is hard.  It's tough work because developers
are always changing strings, and pacemaker is a big project with lots of
user-visible stuff.  I worry that our translation percentage would
always be pretty low.  I know in the past Fedora (and RH?) had people
that just did translations, but I don't know about that anymore.

Fifth, if we really wanted to get crazy with it, we need to consider
that some languages read right to left, some languages have letters
besides upper and lower case, and some languages have characters that
aren't just a single char.  All of these would come up somehow.

This isn't to say it isn't worth it.  If I weren't an English speaker,
I'd want software to use my native language.  It's just tough to do and
keep up with in a moving project.

- Chris