-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [openstack-dev] [oslo] i18n Message improvements Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 17:40:56 -0500 From: Mathew R Odden <mrodden@us.ibm.com> Reply-To: OpenStack Development Mailing List <openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org> To: OpenStack Development Mailing List <openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org> As requested in the last Oslo meeting, I created a blueprint for further discussion on the i18n work in Icehouse here: _https://blueprints.launchpad.net/oslo/+spec/i18n-messages_ There were some ideas from the meeting that I'm sure I wasn't quite fully understanding, so please take a look and let me know if there is any feedback. Also, just to try to recap the discussion and try to state where *I think* we want to head with i18n/Messages, this is where I think we want to go in Icehouse. Make Message objects in oslo less magical by removing a lot of the magic string methods/operators from the class. This doesn't necessarily mean removing all of the "magic" operators (I think __mod__ is still necessary, as pointed out in the whiteboard of the blueprint.) I think some of the functionality is useful to developers when dealing with Messages and strings (unicode strings only hopefully.) The overall shift in direction should be to make projects more aware of the Message objects, and we need to change those to utilize them better instead of trying to make Messages work in all project cases. This was one of the biggest challenges of how it works today; trying to make a Message into a "string". Changing projects to expect/use Messages instead of strings/unicode is necessary if our goal is to make Messages less magical. Some of the changes that need to be done to realize this are outlined in the blueprint, but the big ones are: - needing a better defined public API for messages like the translate() function - needing to utilize unicode (more likely six.text_type) in all areas in OpenStack projects instead of strings (although we should be trying to do this already) - catch any Messages and resolve to unicode before they exit any OpenStack code Any feedback on the blueprint or ML would be appreciated. Thanks, Mathew Odden, Software Developer IBM STG OpenStack Development