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

[יובל האגר]

ביום רביעי 23 מאי 2007, 20:57, נכתב על ידי Gabor Hojtsy:
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> > Taking this a bit further, if 'mo' files were used *instead* of the
> > database, this problem could be easily solved by just letting the web
> > interface put strings in the database which will have precedence over the
> > 'mo' strings.
>
> We would not really need the database then. If we have mo reader code,
> mo writing is not far away. We could use a mo file for user modified
> strings.
>
> Summary: yes, this is a possibility, noone explored it yet, and proved
> it is superior to what we do now.
>
> Gabor

Thank you for the detailed and prompt response. 

-- 
יובל