[MonoDevelop] Skeleton Translation Plugin

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> It would be nice to create some integration between this and the
> autotools addin so that all the neccessary files get distributed.

This is one of the topics that I was discussing with Lluis this weekend,
and wanted to share this with the list.

It deals with internationalization and the effect it has on deploying
the software.

One of the things that we tried to do with the "Application Deployment
Guidelines":

	http://www.mono-project.com/Guidelines:Application_Deployment

Was to allow applications to be relocatable;  

Autoconf/automake today are mostly designed to use the regular Unix
style of deployment where the various application files are scattered on
the file system (binaries in $prefix/bin, libraries in $prefix/lib, data
in $prefix/something else).

With the application deployment guidelines, we suggest that you use:

	$prefix/bin/script 	<- Only one script!
	$prefix/lib/NAME/	<- everything goes here.

But read the rest for the details.

The point is that the only piece that is not relocatable is the startup
script.  With this in mind, what we need to ensure is that applications
do not hardcode the $prefix/share/locale/XX as the directory that is
used for looking up translations.

We should make the Catalog.Init call in Mono.Unix to be relative to the
"assembly" directory:

	Catalog.Init ("package", Path.GetDirectoryName
		 (Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase) + "locale")

This allows the locale information to be relative to the
prefix/lib/NAME/locale directory.

Miguel.