[Gambas-user] "Export" the translation template to a user-defined location

[Emilien Klein]

Hi there, Gambas developers,

We are using Gambas to develop BaShare
(https://launchpad.net/bashare/), and we recently switched to
Launchpad from Google Code.
In the process of setting up the translations in Launchpad (where we
could get the application translated by more people than if we
required our translators to do it from Gambas, which means grabbing a
copy of the trunk code etc...), we were faced with a semi-problem:
Launchpad has the ability to automatically update the lists of
translatable strings if the translation template (.pot file) is under
version control. That way, when a change is made in the template, the
new strings are immediately available to all translators.

However, Gambas by default "hides" the template in a hidden file
inside a hidden folder: it is located at ".lang/.pot".

Our guess was that Gambas tries to hide the file that are used by the
IDE, but that does not make our work easier if we don't want to use
Gambas' integrated translation feature. We tried creating hard links,
symbolic links, but that failed when you try to version those files...

We faced a first refusal to import our .lang/.pot template from the
Launchpad team when we tried to get our doubly-hidden ".lang/.pot"
translation template imported, because using this type of file name is
not something that would be recommended in the Linux world.

My question is the following: Is there (or would there be) an option
to tell Gambas to automatically export (for instance copying the file,
if necessary leaving the .lang/.pot file) the translation template to
a file that is specifiable by the user? That way, Gambas would have
it's copy to do internal translations, but other users could just have
a simple access to the standard template file.

As an example, the translation template could be saved by default at
the root of the project in a file called "messages.pot" (this name is
commonly used in open source projects that use translations with
gettext, but there are also other possibilities).

Anyway, I'd appreciate if someone would take the time to think about
this idea (or tell me if this feature is already present ;) )

Concerning the version: I am using the latest available in Ubuntu
repos (so I guess 2.8.2, but I'm not at my dev machine right now), but
Guido uses the latest from the Ubuntu PPA, which should be the actual
latest release?

Thanks!
Emilien Klein