Self-contained executable for any Linux x86_64 distribution

[Dirk Hohndel]

Lutz Vieweg <lvml at 5t9.de> writes:

> On 03/03/2013 07:56 PM, Miika Turkia wrote:
>>> I tried invoking
>>>    LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 subsurface
>>> but as said, still got the english interface.
>>
>> There is no instructions on selecting language on the user manual (at
>> least my grep didn't give any results). Following seems to give me
>> german:
>> LANGUAGE=de ./subsurface
>
> Interesting, when I do this (with the normal, not-self-contained
> subsurface) then a very few texts (like "Lizenz" or "Schließen")
> are in German, while most texts continue to be in English.

Interesting indeed. What distribution is that on?
And what's the installed language?

This sounds like your OS is switching languages, but Subsurface isn't
finding its own translations. How are you starting Subsurface?

> Can somebody explain what is the basic mechanism of choosing
> among those text alternatives - where and how is this decision
> done in the code? (The subsurface code itself does not access
> an environment variable named LANGUAGE anywhere.)

Correct - this all comes from the gettext infrastructure that we
use. You will see all these instances of _("string literal") or
_(char_pointer_variable). These texts are translated at runtime.

> (Yes, I am obviously lacking any prior experience in localizing
> software with whatever mechanism subsurface has chosen to implement
> this. :-)

Welcome to my life about 5 months ago when I was about to release
Subsurface 2.0 and had about a dozen people independently tell me within
days that a program like that /really/ needed to be localized. A month
later we delivered Subsurface 2.1 in a dozen languages on three
platforms. I'll admit to being a wee bit proud of that achievement :-)

/D