On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 11:11:24AM +0000, Brian Candler wrote:

That's not a viable solution in my case, as I'm not using one of the supported
authentication methods.

For some reason, README_LANG.txt wasn't installed via my build from the NetBSD
Packages Collection (pkgsrc.org), but I'm sure it could be (and should) in the
future. I unpacked the distfile and read it today. I had known about SqWebMail's
ability to work in multiple languages, but thought that it was a bit messy
(based on the old docu @ inter7.com). After reading this file and using pkgsrc
for awhile, I think a solution (using pkgsrc; sorry to those not familiar for
detailing this here) could be to have a BUILD_DEF (that could be set in
/etc/mk.conf or via setenv/export) for something like SQWEBMAIL_DEFAULT_LANG
(which could default to English?) and also a varible for SQWEBMAIL_TRANSLATIONS
with one possible value being "all", which would build templates for all
languages SqWebMail currently supports. Other possible values for that variable
could be any list of languages SqWebMail supports. This is being CC'd to
pkg-...@netbsd.org, who hopefully will correct me if the pkgsrc solutions
proposed seem too kludgy.

That's how I could see it being done with pkgsrc, but what about with other
package management systems? Should SqWebMail default to building all language
templates, like the Sympa mailing list manager, if not defined by the build
environment or should only the English language being installed? I would like to
see the former to be the default behavior. A script could perform the actions
described in README_LANG.txt and pkg management systems could interface with it
via the build environment. I hope this reads somewhat sensical ;)

Yes, and I would also like to see a drop down menu on the login page which could
switch to another language template once the user is successfully logged in and
maybe even something people could select that would swap the templates before
logging in.

Those are absolutely the ideas I've had in mind. Seriously, couldn't have said
it clearer.

Not to my knowledge does ispell have that flag, which is why I proposed the
config file. The default language template should be stored as a user preference
in addition to the default language for spell checking. This shouldn't depend on
the authentication method.

This is also being CC'd to the symp...@cru.fr mailing list. That
project seems to have a working solution for m17n (that is not a harsh criticism
to SqWebMail) and maybe those folk would be willing to discuss it with us.
Hopefully their solution isn't the one you described (for Sam's sake) =)

If there's not already a pure CSS and valid XHTML templates (for English at
least), I would be more than willing to donate my time to converting the
existing template system. I've had a good bit of experience in converting
template systems to valid markup while retaining the existing layout. I think
people who haven't worked with these types of template systems would be
surprised at how much smaller the end file size would be and how much faster the
pages would load (if you could imagine SqWebMail actually loading content
faster).

!tr