ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Christian Dywan [2014-04-16  1:19 +0200]:
> 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.

FWIW, we did measurements back then, and the difference between "all
inline translations" and "all gettext translations" for the complete
boot as well as specifically for gnome-menus (which reads all
*.desktop files) was below the noise level. And that was with slow
rotary disks.

> And it was going to be standardized.

Indeed, we made several attempts for that. Unfortunately it never was
accepted, although several major distributions have used this approach
for years.

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

It's not all that obvious really. You only pay the extra price for
mmapping the .mo file once, and as soon as your application/scope has
a single human readable string outside of the .ini file you are going
to pay it anyway. And that price is very low -- on the SD/SSD-like
cards that we have in phones you won't be able to tell the difference.

But regardless of this, which approach takes 0.001 seconds or 50 bytes
more isn't all that relevant -- We should mainly ask ourselves how we
want to distribute and update translations of apps/scopes: With
langpacks or with uploading new versions of that package? That's going
to determine the practicality and effectivity of the process a whole
lot more.

As I wrote in my other mail, my gut feeling is that we should have
inline translations for third-party apps/scopes and langpack-based
translations for everything we provide in Ubuntu. But there's no
reason why this can't be deciced on a per-package level if necessary,
and as you say there might indeed be phone/click/scope specic reasons
why we'd want one or the other. So I'm not particularly favouring
either approach here as I haven't discussed that in detail with other
people.

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)

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