This is certainly not for 0.19.0.

This should use something like http://pear.php.net/package/File_Gettext as a fallback for when gettext is not available (as it is often not the case, and I don't think all our users can install it or have it installed).

Anyway, the problem with using "real" gettext is that the .mo files get loaded into Apache's memory, and the only way to clear it out and get it to recognize updated .mo files is to restart Apache, which many of our users will be even less likely to be able to do. I have written an almost total replacement of gettext that we use in our PHP projects. Has a much better replacement mechanism than sprintf as suggested by "real" gettext, we "compile" .po files not into .mo files but into special .php files, etc. The latter would make something like File_Gettext unnecessary.

There is still much to discuss before implementation in Mantis can begin. For example:

• Do we continue to have different charsets for different languages or do we switch everything to UTF-8? I'm strongly in favor of the latter but that's a big can of worms; see 0004084.
• Do we write the English strings into the code now, as suggested by gettext, or continue to use string keys as we do now? The former makes the .po files easier to translate but makes it harder to update the English text.

TO: achumakov RE: the UTF-8 implementation
I am setting up on IIS6, MS SQL, and PHP5.2.0, in Hungary. Had problems with
1.0.6 but read comments about global conversion to UTF-8, so migrated to 1.1.0a2
and that seemed to clear things up.

But when I started using SQL Query Analyzer to peek and poke directly into the
database in response to thoughts about generating custom reports (as we commonly
do via TSQL), I noticed UTF-8 displays incorrectly. Its a UTF-8 to Unicode UCS-2 thing apparently.

I found this:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232580

An excerpt:

4. Store the actual UTF-8 data on the server using the
   BINARY/VARBINARY/IMAGE columns. Storing UTF-8 data on SQL Server means that you
   can not use SQL Server to sort or find ranges of these values as if the data
   were valid character data. The types of operations on columns containing UTF-8
   data that would not return expected results include "ORDER BY", greater-than ">"
   and less-than "<" comparisons, and the built-in SQL Server string manipulation
   functions such as SUBSTRING().

:-\ gnarly issue

Closed as WONTFIX. Out current i18n implementation could be a lot better, but using gettext is not a requirement.

Mantis was recently added to the products supported by http://translatewiki.net. That platform also supports a gettext export, which makes it possible to work on Mantis using gettext tools.