Locale?

[aral]

In the core apps that ship with elementary OS, the Application constructor manually sets the locale and binds to the gettext package e.g. in Calculator:

Intl.setlocale (LocaleCategory.ALL, "");
GLib.Intl.bindtextdomain (GETTEXT_PACKAGE, LOCALEDIR);
GLib.Intl.bind_textdomain_codeset (GETTEXT_PACKAGE, "UTF-8");
GLib.Intl.textdomain (GETTEXT_PACKAGE);

The constants used come from the configuration file (Config.vala.in):

public const string GETTEXT_PACKAGE = @GETTEXT_PACKAGE@;
public const string LOCALEDIR = @LOCALEDIR@;

And the actual values are substituted in meson.build:

config_data = configuration_data()
config_data.set_quoted('LOCALEDIR', get_option('prefix') / get_option('localedir'))
config_data.set_quoted('GETTEXT_PACKAGE', meson.project_name())
config_file = configure_file(
    input: 'src/Config.vala.in',
    output: '@BASENAME@',
    configuration: config_data
)

However, none of this is shown in the Translations section of the elementary OS developer documentation.

Can someone with better knowledge of all this than me please answer:

• What does the above code achieve, exactly? (And is there a link to a resource that explains it?)
• Is it required for localisation to work?
• If so, should we open an issue for it to be included in the Translations section of the developer guide?
• Should a version of it be included in the project generated by Watson?

Thanks!

[aral]

Now tracking in #16.