katjam / local-elm Goto Github PK

The goal would be that it is as seamless as possible for developer experience so rather than forking the compiler, we are thinking wrap e.g. dev hot reloads with something.

Plan

• Make proof of concept spikes for some of the ideas to get a feel for UX

• https://github.com/elm-fluent/elm-fluent was implemented for Elm 0.18 based on the Mozilla project fluent framework

How should a user select her translation?

So here are three example ideas (continued from #1 (comment))

1. One executable per locale
   The user could download a specific build that is translated into one language.
   If it is a forked Elm compiler, she could place it in an executable path and name it elm.

2. One executable that donwloads translation resource files
   This would be strange at first, because one compelling thing about Elm is that it is a single binary.
   But maybe it won't be so bad, if the additional translation files are only download when requested by the user and stored in $ELM_HOME.
   The user could use a command like elm-local switch-locale=de or specify an environment variable like $ELM_LOCALE.

3. One executable with multiple translations built-in
   The selection of the locale could be the same as with 2, but no downloads would be needed.

Edit: I changed the text, because it does not have to be a compiler fork, it could be any tool.

The majority are in one place. We can deal with others in a second pass.