[development] updating translations: how valuable is user data after all?

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

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Gabor Hojtsy schrieb:
> יובל האגר wrote:
>> Forgive me if this is a dumb question that have been discussed before..
>>
>> How come Drupal does not use the native gettext 'mo' format (binary
>> po) for strings translation?
>> Why is the process of copying strings from the 'po' into the database
>> is needed? Is it meaningful in terms of performance?
> 
> 1. We should not except the PHP version of Drupal users to have the
> gettext extension loaded, to build on that. Gettext is not a common
> extension installed with PHP as far as we heard/imagine (no hard
> evidence though).
> 
> 2. Anyway, actually noone implemented a gettext extension based locale
> module, so we can benchmark the performance against the current
> implementation. (It could be slower or quicker, we don't know). But see
> the previous point.

I had done benchmarks which indicated no gain. However, a client pointed
out to me that you can save a bit of DB traffic when you do a local
lookup of the translation strings.

> 3. Finally noone come around to implement a MO reader and handler in PHP
> (not using the gettext extension) and proved it that it is better then
> using the database. (Gerhard has some itch to scratch here if I
> understand it right, so it might happen. No hard date on it though, and
> probably as a contrib module first).

IIRC, there is a native PHP MO reader, but it is slow.

> Summary: yes, this is a possibility, noone explored it yet, and proved
> it is superior to what we do now.

Would make a nice feature for D7.

Cheers,
	Gerhard
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