Backend-agnostic template internationalization

[Aymeric Augustin]

Currently makemessages calls django.utils.translation.templatize to turn Django templates into something gettext understands. There is no way for alternate template engines to hook into the string extraction machinery.

This supersedes #20811 and #23299.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Since this ticket describes a new feature and wasn't implemented before 1.8 alpha, it will make it into 1.9 at best. I will use the approach described in #23299 in 1.8 because it's less invasive.

[Aymeric Augustin]

For the record, I didn't use that approach, I recommended using Babel instead. [Edit: this sentence used Jinja2 instead of Babel by mistake]

It's increasingly unclear to me that this is a problem that needs solving.

I'll leave the ticket open because 1.8 has been released only recently.

However I don't plan to work on it and I won't be surprised if it ends up as wontfix.

[Carl Meyer]

Aymeric: I think you meant to say "I recommended using Babel instead"? Or else I'm misunderstanding something.

I think that "just use Babel instead" is a fine option, and there's not much value in having makemessages wrap Babel.

(In the long run, I wonder if we could deprecate makemessages and just recommend ​https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-babel instead).

[Aymeric Augustin]

Yes I meant Babel.

[Preston Timmons]

I wonder how many people using Jinja2 with Django use Babel? The django-jinja library, at least, takes the approach of overriding the makemessages command instead.

Personally, I've found Babel much less constrained than makemessages when the translation workflow requires anything custom, e.g. multiple domain files, files that shouldn't automatically remove obsolete strings, combining po files from multiple apps from a single repository into one, only extracting pot files, etc. These are situational, but with Babel there's minimal retooling necessary if you want to do it. The same can't be said for makemessages.

[Aymeric Augustin]

I haven't heard anyone requesting this since Django 1.8 was released. I assume everyone is happily using Babel.

I'm going to close this as wontfix because there doesn't appear to be a need for this feature. If you think there is, please bring it up on the DevelopersMailingList.