Using profiling to aid direction setting

In computer programming the term profiling is used to indicate when a program
is analysed to see where it spends most of its time.  The theory being that
that is where you should put in effort to optimise the code and thus improve
speed and responsiveness.

A similar concept can be applied to translation.  If you translate only the
messages that people actually see then you can optimise the effort that you
expend on translation.

It also helps focus the translation effort onto programs that are actually
being used, not those that you guess might be being used.

How profiling works on Linux

The gettext libraries are called by a program with a request for the
translation of a given string.  Gettext looks up the string and returns the
translation to the program.

When profiling this call to gettext is intercepted and the message requested is
output to a file.  This file is then later processed and contains all strings
that should be translated.

Problems with profiling

- Many UI design tools and newer UI code calls all strings when initialising
  the UI.  That means that you see many messages that in fact were never seen
  by the user.

- Spurious files.  Many GUI program call command line tools to retrieve data.
  When the command line tool is called those messages are logged but were never
  seen by the user.

- Profiling depends on the usage profile of the user.  An end-user and a system
  administrator will use different tools.  To work best you need a group of
  people using your target applications.

Using profiling

The Gettextlog tool is available here:

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/gettextlog/

An RPM is also available:

	http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gettextlog/gettextlog-0.6-1.i386.rpm?download

Once installed...

	export LD_PRELOAD=/file/to/gettextlog.so

You can place this in your .bash_profile to log continuously or in
/etc/profile.d/ add a gettextlog.sh script to initialise LD_PRELOAD

You can run it against individual programs with the
run-with-gettextlog program

Your profiles will be output to:
	
	$HOME/gettextlog/$PROGRAM.po