Languages

They way we choose a plan is we all keep talking to each other and try to reach a consensus. So if you have a proposal, you should write it up on the wiki, on a page linked from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Developer_notes. Then you post in this forum and ask from comments, and you will probably get people pointing out that this part of your idea does not work in Mongolian, or something, and then so you change your proposal to make it better, until everyone is happy.

If there is more than one proposal we discuss them all, and try to decide which is better.

In Open Source projects, there are about three ways decisions like this get made:

1. Everyone agrees on the same thing.
2. We can't agree, but one person volunteers to do the work, and everyone else thinks their solution is good enough, and so is happy to let them do it their way so that it gets done.
3. If really no-one can agree, we appeal to our benevolent dictator (Martin D) to make a decision.

I think that any new, improved way of handling language strings will have to meet the following requirements:

• Allow all existing language files to be converted automatically to the new format.
• Keep the interface that developers use to load strings (get_string) as similar as possible to the way it works now, so we don't have to change most of the existing Moodle code (strings are used everywhere).
• Make it possible to translate moodle into every known language grammatically and idiomatically.
• Ensure that translators who are familiar with the existing system for editing language strings and creating language packs can use any new system without too much re-learning.
• If possible, work in a way that is similar to tried an tested methods used in other open source projects.