Multiple language product descriptions / categories

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Please implement support for multi language elements in munki. Especially for 
sites with users who speak different languages this would be a very neat 
feature.

The following item should be translatable:
- display_name
- description
- category
- developer(?)

Suggestion:
The translations should be part of the pkginfo files. Right now all those 
fields are plain strings. It should be possible to define a string or a 
dictionary containing multiple strings, whereas the key for contained strings 
might be the ISO language code (en_GB, de_DE etc.). Perhaps a kind of "default 
language" should be defined.

All the munki tools then just need to check if the given item is a string or a 
dictionary and then use the right language.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by choules@wycomco.de on 3 Sep 2014 at 4:37

[GoogleCodeExporter]

"All the munki tools then just need to check if the given item is a string or a 
dictionary and then use the right language."

To not break backwards compatibility the existing string fields must remain 
as-is. We'd need to define new keys for the localized versions. These keys 
would be optional, and of course ignored by older clients.

What does this mean? "All the munki tools"

I imagined only that Managed Software Center would care about the translations.

Extending munkiimport to allow adding additional languages for display_name, 
description, category and developer seems difficult... probably not something 
I'd tackle immediately. (hard to get a feel for how something I don't use 
should actually work)

(And this brings up an interesting point: while Managed Software Center runs as 
the current user, /usr/local/munki/managedsoftwareupdate runs as root. It 
broadcasts its status messages, which interested processes can pick up and 
display. At the loginwindow, MunkiStatus is also running as root. Therefore the 
user's localization choices might not actually be reflected in the status 
messages (which I think would be mostly limited to display_name).)

Original comment by gregnea...@mac.com on 3 Sep 2014 at 4:47

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Backwards compatibility is a good point, so the new key containing the 
dictionary might look like "display_name_localized", "description_localized" 
etc.

"All the munki tools" meant "All munki tools that display information to the 
end user" ;-) (what may be just MSC, I actually don't know)

I don't think that munkiimport should handle those new fields.

For the processes running in login window a translation would be nice, too. But 
they are not as important as MSC, I guess.

Original comment by choules@wycomco.de on 3 Sep 2014 at 5:02