[boost] [locale] Review

Subject: [boost] [locale] Review
From: Noah Roberts (roberts.noah_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-15 18:53:04

     - What is your evaluation of the design?

Functions.  Seems straight forward to use.

     - What is your evaluation of the implementation?

What I used worked.  I did not look over the source.

     - What is your evaluation of the documentation?

Good except that there are at least some errors/inconsistencies 
(ngettext in messages_formatting.html for example is missing an argument).

Also need to be explicit about which version of 3rd party programs are 
required (see below).

     - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the
       library?

I'll probably be using it for our product (assuming it plays fine with 
Qt, which I don't see any reason why not) so I'd say very.

     - Did you try to use the library?  With what compiler?  Did you
       have any problems?

Yes.  MSVC2010.  No problems specific to the library but did have a 
pretty hard time figuring out which version of gettext was necessary and 
finding it.  Simple search for gettext win32 or windows does not turn up 
a version compatible with this library (--keyword=translate:1,1t syntax 
invalid).  Had to get the recent MSYS developer toolkit (mingw + msys 
wasn't even enough).  After a couple of hours of searching it seemed to 
be the only option.

     - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A
       quick reading? In-depth study?

I wrote a simple program and played with a few of the functions.  I 
downloaded and installed various tools that are supposed to help with 
translating.  Basically did a short, 4 hour evaluation of whether I 
could propose it for use.

     - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

Not as much as I certainly should be.

     - Should it be in boost?

I have some concerns about the fact that it relies so much on 3rd party 
stuff.  The gettext tools are obviously moving targets and not having an 
easily accessible version of xgettext for Visual Studio users is not an 
optimal situation.  Having to install MinGW and the works shouldn't be 
required.  Various supposed binary downloads of gettext for win32 either 
are not or are too old.

I also found that of the tools listed for working on po files, only one 
both worked with plural forms and worked on win32.  In fact possibly 
only the one worked with plural forms at all.

The fact that this library implements a gettext like setup is nice, but 
the dependency then upon gettext to provide the source extraction tools 
and such is unfortunate and could certainly lead to problems where there 
are version conflicts.  Based on my experience I'd say that clearly 
there are some availability issues in this area for those using Visual 
Studio.  Since gettext is someone else's problem, I don't see how boost 
can safely make sure the necessary programs are available to anyone 
using boost.  Certainly some better documentation about which version of 
gettext is being emulated should be included (I looked through the docs 
and never saw anything specifying version).

Once I did find the correct version of the tools (or at least a version 
that responded as the documentation explained) the system seemed to work 
out just fine.  I would like to see an alternative to a complete msys 
install (though I personally like to have it around, others on my team 
find it useless).  I would guess that there should be one but I 
seriously couldn't find it.

I would also like to see boost::locale::format work like  boost::format. 
  The documentation also calls this thing a printf like utility class 
but it doesn't, as opposed to boost::format, accept  printf format 
strings.  On the other hand, boost::format(translate("%.4g")) % 3.14 
worked just fine so I don't know what this locale specific version is 
providing.

All that said, I think it could be a good addition.  We certainly need 
something like it and it at least does what I think I need from such a 
library.