[development] Multilingual support

[Roberto Gerola]

Hi.

I'm the author of Localizer, a module alternative to Internationalization,
that adds multilingual support to Drupal.

For whom interested in details of my module here
there are some links :

Project page : http://drupal.org/project/localizer
Project issues : http://drupal.org/project/issues/localizer
Manual, written by a friend, Edward : http://drupal.org/node/103419
(and we are working on a multilingual manual too)

I have joined months ago the groups to add multilingual support
to Drupal core : http://groups.drupal.org/i18n,
where I have posted also my ideas and my proposals.

I had joined also the mailing list activated by DevelopmentSeed :
http://devseeddev.com/pipermail/internationalization_devseeddev.com/

But, unfortunately, it seems to me that there is not much activity on these
communications channels.

Reading this post http://groups.drupal.org/node/2781
and taking a look at the Subversion repository here :
http://svn3.cvsdude.com/devseed/sandbox
it seems to me that some crucial decisions about multingual
support in Drupal are already taken, or am I wrong ?

For example, if I understand correctly, taxonomy translations
will be implemented duplicating the trees, variables will
be duplicated in their own table adding a language attribute.

Well, I would like to know what is, if exists, the list of features
that will be implemented in Drupal 6 to achieve multilingual support,
and also the technical solutions that could be adopted.
For example, if the variables translation mechanism is definitive,
we could think to use it soon, without working now on a different
solution that could be abandoned in the next months.
For taxonomy we could already port the new patches for the
translation, and so on.

I'm asking this because I would like, if possible, to avoid duplicating
work and to be able to prepare a migration path for the users
of Localizer when multilingual support will be in the core, probably,
in the next release.

As you can see in the issue lists of Localizer, we are working hard and 
there are
some good requests by the users.
I wonder if something of all this already done work can be used, at
least as logic or idea if not as code.

Many thanks.

Roberto.