ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Christian Dywan <christian.dywan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2014-04-15 23:02, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 22:26 +0200, Christian Dywan wrote:
>> Does this imply that the recommendation for .desktop files should also
>> change? If scopes are slow to load with .mo files, wouldn't the same
>> apply to .desktop files? Or maybe the question is what is "wrong" with
>> scopes that they can't be as efficient as .desktop files?
> I'm not quite sure what you're asking. The strings being in the .ini
> or .desktop file directly is going to be faster than doing a bunch of
> stat() calls on the disk, loading another binary file, finding the
> translation index, grabbing the string, and finally showing it, when
> we're already going to have to parse the .ini or .desktop files to get
> the untranslated string, and the gettext domain, anyway. If the
> translated strings are also in the same file, it's a lot less work that
> has to be done, to get those translations into the UI. We would be
> handling the .ini and .desktop files the same way.
>
> Placing the gettext domain in the .desktop file is not part of the
> FreeDesktop specification, anyway. It's just something that was done on
> Ubuntu, to aid in the creation of translation packs. It was never "more
> efficient" in terms of pure computing performance, to do it that way.

For several years multiple distributions including Ubuntu, Suse, Maemo
and others tried to get them out of the .desktop files. The performance
implications were much bigger because machines back then had slow
spinning drives. And it was going to be standardized.
I realize things are being re-evalutated in the phone era but it can't
hurt to double-check that we intentionally change decisions as opposed
to repeating mistakes.


Just to be clear, I completely agree it's obviously more efficient.

ciao,
    Christian

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature