support context for .desktop files

[Lukas Sommer]

Please support context information (resulting in msgctxt in the .pot file) for extracting strings from .desktop files templates with intltool-extract.

Actual results:

There is no way to set the context information for the strings. But this is useful for applications who use by police a special semantic markup with fixed contexts (e.g. http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Localization/i18n_Semantics#Context_Markers).

Expected results:

Provide a way to determine individual context information for the entries in .desktop files.

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

We'd have to discuss for http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/ to be updated with context field first. Not sure this would be trivial, so we can add an intltool extension, but ideally, it would be included in the .desktop file specification.

[Colomban Wendling (banw)]

Couldn't "just" the entries have the group as their context? ("Desktop Entry" in case of Desktop files) This probably would require a specific opt-in option not to break current translations, but I would imagine it would work and address most conflicts. Though it's possibly too specific and would lead to duplicate translations, if some keys could be shared not not others.

[Moritz Bruder (muesli4-2)]

This issue surfaced when one of the translators of GMPC used a newline in the desktop file markup (but the string was shared with several C files) leading to not showing the application entry at all.

Would it be possible to always generate a separate entry (with a new msgctxt) in the po file for strings from desktop files? (A bit of developer / translator effort.)

Another alternative would be to provide special syntax to specify the msgctxt in desktop files (since it's possible in C). E.g., _u_ instead of _ (Is there some possible syntax?). (Results in no effort for anyone but the developers are able to fix related bugs easily.)