Subject: My wishlist
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Sat Feb 10 2001 - 22:31:41 CST
Some of these would make great POW's.
1) Gettext
Ever ran 'strings' on Abiword_d lately? Did you notice that your
binary has Polish translations of everything? Ouch. As something _in
the binary_, this is going to be loaded for the duration of AbiWord's
run, and will remain in memory the whole time. Sure it could be
swapped out, but these strings that most are likely to never see or
want will be fighting with your applications for physical RAM. Gettext
does this the Right Way, by putting each language's strings into a
file which is only loaded if the user has elected to localize to that
language. Not only is it the standard Unix internationalization
mechanism, but it also compiles string files into efficient and
compact database files. Yes, gettext works on Windows. Not sure about
QNX. But I bet it sucks to have all of your strings in your binary on
your embedded real-time OS ;-). IMHO one of the best things about
gettext is it's easy to turn off. You could do a make
ABI_OPT_GETTEXT=0 which would do
#define _(String) String
instead of
#define _(String) gettext(String)
This is nice because most users use the English version and they can
get a speedup and hard disk space by turning off internationalization.
This needs to be done. Badly. But I'm not sure how to transition.
2) Autoconf
The need for this is obvious. I know that "make realclean" wastes much
of my development time. I know there were patches posted at one point
and they worked wonderfully. These need revival and a commit.
3) Unix frontend optimizations
xap's GTK code is pretty lame. For example, font strings are reparsed
millions of times! These issues were discussed on the list today
4) Normal mode
I wrote an initial implementation of this long ago. Dom and I are
working on reviving it.
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