view README.CVS @ 7724:613b20c69d2c

[gaim-migrate @ 8369] this didn't cause me any problems yesterday, and it compiles, and bug fixing is a good thing. "Some month ago I introduced translatable texts for "gaim --help" and "gaim-remote --help". Unfortunately the output of the translated text is often unreadable. The problem is, that Gaim's *.po files have the UTF-8 locale (because this is the default charset for GTK+ 2.0). But the users may have configured other locales. For instance my SuSE Linux 9.0 system is configured with LANG=de_DE@euro. "euro" is ISO-8859-1 (Western character set, 8 Bit, with the Euro currency symbol). Lots of UTF-8 characters are unreadable if they are displayed in a 8 Bit charset without conversion. Only the 7 Bit chars are displayed right. There are two possible solutions: 1) Make the console texts untranslatable. This isn't very clever. 2) Convert the texts from UTF-8 to user's locale. I choose the second solution. The conversion cannot be made during the translation, because gettext does not allow a mix of different character sets in one po-file. My patch converts the console strings from UTF-8 to users locale. Normally this works right, because most users have a locale which is compatible with their language. The case where a user uses a language (for instance German: LANG=de_DE) with an incompatible character set (for instance the 7Bit charset LC_CTYPE=C) is also handled. The user then sees a warning and the original UTF-8 message. At first I tried to make a new UTF-8 function in src/util.c. But the function is needed 5 times in src/gaim-remote.c and 2 times in src/main.c. gaim-remote is not linked against util.o. Also there are a lot of dependencies from util.o to other files, so I will introduce a lot of trouble to link gaim-remote against util.o. So I only wrote a function in src/gaim-remote.c and used the UTF-8 conversion inline in src/main.c." --Bjoern Voigt committer: Tailor Script <[e-mail]>

If you plan to use gaim CVS, PLEASE read this message in its entirety!

Gaim is a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular release schedule.  
Due to the rate of gaim development, CVS undergoes frequent bursts of 
massive changes, often leaving behind brokenness and partial 
functionality while the responsible developers rewrite some portion of 
code or seek to add new features.

What this all boils down to is that CVS _WILL_ sometimes be broken.
Because of this, we ask that users who are not interested in
personally tracking down bugs and fixing them (without a lot of
assistance from the developers!) avoid CVS and use releases.  Since
releases will be made often, this should not prevent anyone from using
the newest, shiniest features -- but it will prevent users from having
to deal with ugly development bugs that we already know about but
haven't gotten around to fixing.

If you are interested in hacking on gaim, please read README and
HACKING, and take note of the issues in PROGRAMMING_NOTES.  (Note that
they may be somewhat out of date at times.) Win32 developers, please
read README.mingw.

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code.  Not
all parts of gaim have yet been documented, but the major subsystems
are falling fast.  If you have doxygen, you can use the Doxyfile in
the toplevel directory to generate pretty documentation.  Otherwise
(or even if you do!), the header files for each subsystem contain
documentation for the functions they contain.  For instance,
conversation.h contains documentation for the entire
gaim_conversation_* API, and account.h contains documentation for the
gaim_account_* API.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the gaim developers
by email at [e-mail], on IRC at
irc.freenode.net in #gaim, or via the sourceforge forums at
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gaim.  Please do as much homework
as you can before contacting us; the more you know about your
question, the faster and more effectively we can help you!

Send patches to [e-mail] or post them in the
Sourceforge forums at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gaim.