Comment by bmn__
10 days ago
Looking for an expert who knows both libintl/Gettext and MessageFormat.
What is the equivalent of xgettext.pl, the file extension for the main catalog file `.po`, the __ function?
How does gender work (small example)? How does layering pt_BR on pt_PT work?
What is a compelling reason to switch?
https://messageformat.unicode.org/
Lmk if you have further questions!
The site behind that link gives answers to only 2 out of 6 question. If your goal was to promote and teach, then you have failed. If your goal was to demoralise the HN readers and grind the conversation to a stop, then you have succeeded.
Definitely the former, apologies for making it confusing.
> What is the equivalent of xgettext.pl
There is no standard one, although people build their own. The general consensus is that source strings should not be inlined into code. The closest analogy is to "style" vs "class" in HTML/CSS - the clean separation of concerns comes from the "id" being the contract.
You can read more about it here: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...
There are attempts to "merge" those two philosophies, by extracting and "generating" slugs as ids. Examples: - https://formatjs.github.io/docs/getting-started/message-extr... - https://lingui.dev/guides/message-extraction - https://app.studyraid.com/en/read/15768/550728/setting-up-th...
I'm fairly skeptical of this approach.
> the file extension for the main catalog file `.po`
In MF1.0 world, the file format is JSON or XML. You encode id=>Message pairs. In Fluent world there is a Fluent (FTL) file format. In MF2.0 the format itself is, again, message scoped. On top of it there's a proposal by Mozilla to create MessageResource - https://github.com/w3c/i18n-discuss/blob/gh-pages/explainers... and that may feed into DOM L10n - https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/blob/main/dom-localiza...
> the __ function?
see the (1) and links to "generated ids".
> How does gender work (small example)?
MF 1.0:
``` {GENDER, select, male {He answered} female {She answered} other {They answered} } ```
Fluent: ``` user-answered = { $gender -> [male] He answered. [female] She answered. *[other] They answered. } ```
> How does layering pt_BR on pt_PT work?
MF does not prescribe fallback behavior. It also more popular to treat each locale as "complete" and fill "gaps" at build time. So at runtime you have `pt-BR` which has pt-BR strings and missing ones "completed" from `pt` (parent locale).
Fluent has a "resource manager" (simple one like this: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent-rs/tree/main/fluent-... or more complex like Mozilla L10nRegistry), which can fallback at runtime, allowing for what we call "partial locales" which can roll out to production with gaps and the resource manager will fetch the fallback strings from the parent locale.
> What is a compelling reason to switch?
If you and your users are happy with gettext, none!
If either of those groups complain, there may be many: - https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...
Hope that helps!
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