I currently try to figure out how liblocale-gettext-perl works, so I
started reading the man page, however, it just gives you a summary of
the options.
1. Please either add the "quick tutorial" of
/usr/share/doc/liblocale-gettext-perl/README.gz in the man page or
put at least /usr/share/doc/liblocale-gettext-perl/README.gz in SEE
ALSO.
2. So I marked up a test string in the source to see how it works. So
I am at Step 4 in the tutorial. Now this is the point where
additional information would be highly welcome. First, why do you
mention msgfmt(1) here? At this step it is not needed and you
actually refer to it again in Step 5.
Then I don't think the suggestion to hand-write the .po-file is
not very sensible as it causes lots of (unnecessary) work and is
error prone.
As an (sensible) alternative you write:
You can use the xgettext(1) utility to initially construct this
file from all of the gettext() calls in your source code. It was
designed for C but it works OK with perl.
I was (so far, still reading the xgettext man and info pages)
unsucessful to create a useful .po-file. (So I don't know how you
define "OK")
The main problem is how I tell xgettext which are my strings.
First it seems to not like non-ASCII characters (I have some
german comments atm) (got that working --from-code=ISO-8859-1).
Then the file is almost empty, only the string in
my $d = Locale::gettext->domain("rechnung");
i.e. "rechnung" is offered for translation. (Which is of course
wrong, as it is the gettext-domain, not a string in the programm).
I tried playing with the "-k" option, unsucessfully. The only way
to get all strings (and many more, unfortunately) is the "-a"
option (and it gives a ton of warnings as well).
Next I started reading the gettext info pages. They have a section
regarding perl and even some examples (in
/usr/share/doc/gettext-doc/examples/hello-perl) but those look
differently from the documentation in this package.
Finally I found, that
-k --keyword="get"
seems to be the proper options (I could not get $d->get to work).
3. To aid along this, a small example (with a Makfile, like in the
gettext docu above) should be included.