ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[James Henstridge <james.henstridge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 7:19 AM, Christian Dywan
<christian.dywan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure the reason for taking the
translations out of the .desktop files was to make language packs more
powerful.  If the strings in the .desktop file are looked up in a .mo
file, then a new language pack can translate an app and its metadata
in one go.  We were able to distribute the language pack as an
independent package with its own update cycle independent of the
applications it translated.  If the strings were still in the .desktop
files, then it would be necessary to rebuild the application each time
new translations were made to get this benefit.

If we aren't going to have OS wide language packs, then this isn't a
clear win any more.

James.