On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:51 -0500, Stephen Forrest
<stephen.forrest(a)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