Rowan Collins wrote:
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:51 -0500, Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest@gmail.com wrote:
I suspect that the idea behind James' question was to share MediaWiki system messages across Wikipedias in the same language. (This is because I happen to know that the Language*.php system is not used on the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia.)
Unless I'm much mistaken, this is simply a case of no-one having created the LanguageAng.php file yet. Surely, once all the messages have been defined, you can *create* that file, and thus copy all the changes to new wikis. Or is there some reason that Anglo-Saxon has been denied its own translation file?
LanguageXx.php files are complicated, hard to create and hard to update. Every language file has to be carefully checked by a developer for security flaws, and 9 times out of 10 there are PHP syntax errors. They also require much developer attention to commit to CVS and to put on to the live server. You can be sure that any proposal to reduce the need to use them will get my attention.
It was my hope that the MediaWiki namespace would largely do away with the need to create language files, however that need remained and recent developments (the growth in multi-language projects and the ability for users to select the interface language) have exacerbated our dependence on them.
-- Tim Starling