Internationalization under Windows...

[Christophe]

;-) Obviously Windows users are fluently speaking English ...
So does Bill Gates.

You don't have monopoly on provocation you know

Yes, fine, but honestly I wouldn't be all that happy to see these patches in the official version...There are many things I would have to say here...

If they can do this, they can do other stuff as well. That's part of my critic, they're not part of the project and don't seem to want to be part of it, working in the same direction.

I think there are ways to get even those 'entertainment' features into the mainline Celestia and keep you happy. A plugin system for example could be a way to do this, keeping a focused scientifically acurate core while allowing extendability in ways not possible today. Such a system could very well be used to develop more scientificaly acute features which otherwise would never make it into Celestia.

[Paolo]

Guys your efforts are laudable.
But after years of discussions I still believe that all of this is an incredible waste of time.

Many interesting ideas pop out in the time, (add-on manager, cosmological Celestia, multi wavelenght, and this last one of the core + plugins). And the precious time of the small crew of developers is wasted trying to compile multilanguage versions of Celestia on various platforms.

IMHO I still believe Celestia needs a unified GUI framework. Do you belive that GTK is suitable? Do you prefer QT? Do you want to develop your own one? It does not matter. After an intitial hard step the advatages like immediate and native cross platform multilanguage internationalization are manifest.

Kind regards

[HB]

this message has been posted earlier but in another thread.
It seems that this thread is a better place.


Since the new files with the gettext support for Win32, the proper libraries and includefiles for it are avaible, compiling and linking works fine with the commandline tools from the VC++ Toolkit 2003.

If I want to do the same with the VS7.0 IDE application and with the /MD switch set, linking doesn't work.(multi-threathing-DLL-msvcrt.lib)
The only way I can compile and link Celestia is with the /ML switch set and with the option /nodefaultlib:"libcmt.lib; msvcrt.lib". This to avoid any conflict with declared functions in other libraries (e.g. Libc.lib.)
Question: Is this normal?

I've checked these options with the command line nmake tool.

I've found out that Celestia will build too without the MFLAGS=-MD option.
Question: are there other functions of MFLAGS=-MD then the existing descriptions in the MSDN libraries?

This option is set in winbuild.mak and passed to all the *.mak files in the subdirectories.
But the *.mak files still have the /ML option set.
Question: Is it possible that the MD-option in winbuild.mak overrules the /ML option?

New features which are still under construction can better introduced in the same manner as what is done with the introduction of the CelX feature, with conditional compiler directives.
For those guys who are willing to help with testing, improving and debugging the software can switch the concerning directive on.
And those who have less interest in poking around in the software will not have any notice of those new experimental features if the directive has been switched off (as default ofcoarse)

Question: Maybe too premature but how do we link the *.po files with celestia?

[t00fri]

The updated version of winlibs-new.zip is available now. I had no problems building and running Celetia from CVS this morning. I use makerelease.bat, however, and the default US English interface.

With this updated version of the winlibs I now can also build Celestia-CVS via makerelease.bat. However, with the VS .net 2003 GUI, my usual Windows development environment, compilation still stops with errors. It's the error number C1083 about which the internet has PLENTY of entries. The point is that the libintl.h and a few other includes are not found despite correct configuration of the respective paths. It seems I'll have to restart and reconfigure all project files from scratch which is tedious and time consuming...No idea what the reason is. I think I know the configuration pretty well after three years of regular use of this environment.


Bye Fridger

[HB]

Christophe Wrote:

What I'm getting really frustrated with is the apparent total lack of windows dev interest in the project.

The windows user base is what? something like 20 times that of the other platforms? and we have a grand total of one active developer (Chris nonetheless), if ratios of users held we should have something like a hundred! a real army. I really don't get this, are windows developers generaly incompetent? a bunch of freeloaders?

I know some developers release their own patched version of Celestia, why do they keep to themselves and don't get more involved in the project as a whole?

If you take into account that often the used software, for example with this multilingual feature is free software, coming from sites such as GNU or Sourceforge and that most of the software found is in the first place not directly designed for Win32 platforms but more or less based on Linux and Unix systems , then this huge army of Win32 developers are in a minority.

It would be nice to announce to the Celestia-Community the new development (and needs)for Celestia in a earlier stage and keep them informed about the progress with it.

In this matter I get confronted with this new feature because building Celestia with MS C++ toolkit 2003 doesn't work anymore.
As usual I try to find the cause of the problem and found out by reading this thread and all about gettext that this multilingual feature is nearly done for other platforms then Windows.
In this stadium of development for Linux or Unix, it's becomes more difficult to get things working properly for Windows and to building it with MS C++ toolkit 2003.

Anyone who is using the science of Celestia will have a certain education level. Understanding good English is just a small part of it.

More or less I agree with some among us: it's a waste of precious developer time, CPU cycletime and memory.

[Vincent]

Anyone who is using the science of Celestia will have a certain education level. Understanding good English is just a small part of it. More or less I agree with some among us: it's a waste of precious developer time, CPU cycletime and memory.

Well, I don't agree with you on that point. Celestia is a fantastic educational tool. What about non-english speaking pupils/kids who use it at home and in their schools ? Has Celestia to be used only by adults "with a certain education level" and english-speaking children ?...

[HB]

t00fri wrote:

With this updated version of the winlibs I now can also build Celestia-CVS via makerelease.bat. However, with the VS .net 2003 GUI, my usual Windows development environment, compilation still stops with errors. It's the error number C1083 about which the internet has PLENTY of entries. The point is that the libintl.h and a few other includes are not found despite correct configuration of the respective paths. It seems I'll have to restart and reconfigure all project files from scratch which is tedious and time consuming...No idea what the reason is. I think I know the configuration pretty well after three years of regular use of this environment.

Have you set the correct path to libintl.h not only in Celestia-project but in Celutil-project and Celengine-project as well ?

[HB]

Vincent wrote:

HB wrote:
Anyone who is using the science of Celestia will have a certain education level. Understanding good English is just a small part of it. More or less I agree with some among us: it's a waste of precious developer time, CPU cycletime and memory.


Well, I don't agree with you on that point. What about non-english speaking pupils/kids using Celestia at home and in their schools ? Has Celestia to be used only by adults "with a certain education level" and english-speaking children ?...

To explain and teach children the science of Celestia and so about Astronomy in common one need to have another version, like the old NASA version. Of coarse translated to your own native language, This teaching maual is including the url's to Celestia's CelX or Cel-scripts from which comments to display are easy to write in your own language.

Beside of that, You can never start too early to teach a non-english speaking kid, even the French ones, English.

[Vincent]

Beside of that, You can never start too early to teach a non-english speaking kid, even the French ones, English.

That's what I do with my pupils.. But please, every professional of education will tell you : "One difficulty at a time !"

[steffens]

More or less I agree with some among us: it's a waste of precious developer time, CPU cycletime and memory.

Celestia is open source software, after all. As long as there are developers that want to spend time on localization because it has some value for them - why should they not just go and do so?
A localized version of Celestia does not waste CPU cycletime and (relevant amounts of) memory, so if you are not interested in this, it will not disturb you either.

Build problems are unavoidable from time to time in such big and multiplatform projects. We are talking about CVS code here! I remember times with lots of CVS build problems on linux (>3 years ago) ...

steffens

[t00fri]

Anyone who is using the science of Celestia will have a certain education level. Understanding good English is just a small part of it. More or less I agree with some among us: it's a waste of precious developer time, CPU cycletime and memory.

Well, I don't agree with you on that point. Celestia is a fantastic educational tool. What about non-english speaking pupils/kids who use it at home and in their schools ? Has Celestia to be used only by adults "with a certain education level" and english-speaking children ?...

Practically all POP music on this globe is in ENGLISH and mostly enjoyed by "kids" (don't argue about the maximal age of a "kid" ) .

While many "kids" don't seem to listen much to their English teacher, they do seem to be curious about the content of the songs from their English speaking idols. So even pop music is in that sense "educational"

Perhaps Celestia in /plain English/ also may teach some elementary english expressions of Science to some or at least stimulate curiosity...

Many "language-lazy" young people don't even remotely realize how much their career perspectives will be cut back within the next 20 years, say, without ~fluent knowledge of English. This certainly does not only include "top"-level careers!


Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

...
But please, every professional of education will tell you : "One difficulty at a time !"

Also here I don't agree: since e.g. scientists typically spend 5-10 years of their (younger) professional life ABROAD, the fraction of couples with different native languages is naturally fairly high in our community. Virtually all kids of these couples grow up bilingually without noticable problems.

Jesuits, whose schools are world famous, have realized since long that small kids have a comparatively vast ability to absorb (foreign) languages, while older age is more effective for teaching math and science stuff.

Bye Fridger

[Christophe]

If you take into account that often the used software, for example with this multilingual feature is free software, coming from sites such as GNU or Sourceforge and that most of the software found is in the first place not directly designed for Win32 platforms but more or less based on Linux and Unix systems , then this huge army of Win32 developers are in a minority.

Ok, culturaly the FOSS movement has its roots in Unix, but that movement was started more than 20 years ago and is now pervasive even on Windows. And come on but ONE active windows developer?

It would be nice to announce to the Celestia-Community the new development (and needs)for Celestia in a earlier stage and keep them informed about the progress with it.

This was discussed at length on the forums, a patch was released, complete with instructions and even a prebuild binary. An annoucement was made on the mailing list. Honnestly what else could have been done?

The need for I18N on Windows is well known, to the point that 'hand made' translated versions have been released in several languages. That is even what motivated my working on it despite the fact that I haven't used Windows for ten years. I just can't stand the fact that dedicated people (non developers) litteraly waste their time translating strings in the source code, a task which has to be redone for each new release and can't be shared with other platforms, when all it took is two hours of a developer's time to enable gettext and take advantage of the existing catalog files.

In this stadium of development for Linux or Unix, it's becomes more difficult to get things working properly for Windows and to building it with MS C++ toolkit 2003.

Blame MS for developing its own standards. But in this case it was a development done specificaly for Windows.

Anyone who is using the science of Celestia will have a certain education level. Understanding good English is just a small part of it.

Try and explain that to the people who have spent days translating Celestia to other languages.

More or less I agree with some among us: it's a waste of precious developer time, CPU cycletime and memory.

I wouldn't call a two hour job a waste of time. Not doing it would have been.

[Christophe]

Practically all POP music on this globe is in ENGLISH and mostly enjoyed by "kids" (don't argue about the maximal age of a "kid" ) .

While many "kids" don't seem to listen much to their English teacher, they do seem to be curious about the content of the songs from their English speaking idols. So even pop music is in that sense "educational"

Well, if you truly believe teenagers understand the lyrics of English pop songs you're a bit more candid than I thought

Although everybody here agrees that learning English can't be a bad thing, and using Celestia in English can help or encourage people to learn English, there are simple facts of life that you can't ignore.

One of them being that in many countries a teaching tool (a book, software or else) won't even be considered if it's not available in the national language. That's at least the case in France were the school is 'Republican' and there is a strong tie between the State, the Nation and the French language.

You can regret as much as you want those kind of nationalistic stances, that won't make them go away.

And that's not the sole reason for internationalisation, it simply provides a nicer and more consistent experience to people using localized desktops. I personaly don't mind using Celestia in English but I still prefer to run it in French when the rest of my desktop is also configured in French.

[Christophe]

I must also add that on English systems i18n also adds the option to use English names for constellations instead of latin names. So i18n can actually be a tool to improve one's English.

[Vincent]

While many "kids" don't seem to listen much to their English teacher, they do seem to be curious about the content of the songs from their English speaking idols. So even pop music is in that sense "educational"

Yes, of course Fridger. But kids who are learning english in complete autonomy by listening to english lyrics is one thing. Trying to give more than 25 pupils at a time in a ZEP (priority education area) a chance to navigate on a 3D space simulator is another thing... Don't forget the reality of the field...

Jesuits, whose schools are world famous, have realized since long that small kids have a comparatively vast ability to absorb (foreign) languages, while older age is more effective for teaching math and science stuff.

Well, I don't have the luck to teach sciences to Jesuits kids. "My" pupils' reality is completely different... It's a very hard task to teach them how to speak/to write in a correct french language... Maybe we're not talking about children who come from the same universe...

[Boux]

Christophe, Vincent,
Just give up on this and save your energy.
This discussion is pointless and is a waste of time.
Let's go on to next steps.

[georgiouk]

Hi to all celestians.
Although the gettext works fine for the el.po (for greek) (many thanks to Christophe for all his help )
I have a question
How can sb create the celestia-i18n.exe?


Thanks for your time.

K.Georgiou

[Christophe]

You've got two options: either work from the 1.4.1 source and apply the patch provided on http://celestia.teyssier.org/download/win32/
or simply compile the latest cvs which already includes the patch.

There is also a perl script in CVS which can produce translated versions of the resource file from the po files. If you run it and rename the generated celestia_el.res to celestia.rc before compiling, you'll get a fully translated binary.

[georgiouk]

Thank you very much.
I will try it .

Thanks again.

georgiouk.