Command line flags for translations

[JakobDev]

.desktop files can have translated comments and names e.g. comment[de]=Comment. Would be nice, if gendesk supports this.

[xyproto]

Thanks for reporting, I'll add a way to support this.

[xyproto]

I've been giving this some thought.

Adding translation support to gendesk could be implemented in a way that would look a bit like this:

--comment=en:'Real-time synthesizer' --comment=fr:'Synthétiseur temps-réel' --comment=nb:'Sanntids-synthesizer' [etc.]

But when adding translations for many languages, this will easily become an unreasonably long gendesk command.

An alternative is to use the setconf utility to add translations, like this:

setconf -a zynaddsubfx.desktop 'Comment[fr]' 'Synthétiseur temps-réel'

Or just echo, like this:

echo 'Comment[fr]=Synthétiseur temps-réel' >> zynaddsubfx.desktop

Using setconf or echo for translations looks cleaner and easier to me, than adding flags to gendesk. Gendesk can help out in creating .desktop files from scratch, while supplying a minimum of information, but translations are specialized enough that there's not much left for Gendesk to help out with.

What do you think?

[xyproto]

Thinking some more about this, keeping data in a declarative format is better than using commands that do the same.

Keeping translations in a file also makes it easier to keep track of changes if it's checked into a git repository.

I'll add support for reading translations from a .po, json or .toml file.

[JakobDev]

I use gendesk for creating .desktop files in a PKGBUILd in AUR (example,) so I doesen't need any extra file. I know it's possible to add extra files in AUR. I would prefer to do translations just with arguments. In the most cases there are only a few languages, so the command isn't too long. Maybe it's the best to support translation from commandline and from a file.

[xyproto]

What if there was a translate_desktop tool that could automatically translate from English to a list of languages? Would that be something?

It would be in line with the idea of Gendesk idea of generating a good starting point for a .desktop file, even when little initial information is given.

[JakobDev]

I would prefer to do this in gendesk, because it's in the repositories of most distributions.

[xyproto]

I see. Would a translation of just the package description usually be enough?

[JakobDev]

Description and Comment would be enough for me, but I can't speak for other people which may have the same problem.