[Freeciv-Dev] Re: notify_player rewrite

[Jed Davis <jldavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--On Wednesday, 9 August 2000 10:54 AM +0200 "Per I. Mathisen" 
<Per.Inge.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Lauri Tarkkala wrote:
> > Yet, when I grep the code in server/*.c, it seems like
> > all the notify_player() arguments are specified in plain
> > english, like:
> >
> > > notify_player_ex(unit_owner(punit), src_x, src_y,
> > >                  E_NOEVENT, _("Game: Only %s can attack from sea."),
> > >                  units_str);
> >
> > Where do locales come into play? Is this not the string which
> > is received by the client?
> No, not always. Cleverly hidden in that code fragment is the gettext macro
>  _( ), which replaces the English text with whatever language string you
> import from the .po files.
>
> This is all well documented at http://www.freeciv.org/i18n.html.
But wouldn't that internationalize based on the locale of the server? 
Surely it would be better to send the strings untranslated and pass them 
through gettext and format them in the client instead.  Or, as suggested by 
others, represent at least some of them as ints 
(unit/city/event/building/etc. ID's) to save network traffic.
--Jed