localization

[omkelderman]

I've read and understand the scope section of the readme, so I expect this to be probably out of scope for the project, but figured I can at least ask 😄

I recently installed this on a server of mine for my dad to use to give him a simple interface to share files. His English is not the best so ideally I'd like to give him a Dutch UI. To be fair, it is simple enough that it's not actually a problem, but would be a nice QoL improvement.
So if you deem this out of scope, I wouldn't mind too much, but I think it would be a very nice addition to have localization support. Maybe other users with other languages like it as well?

I'd PR something but I have next to no experience with go so I'd probably create something horrible 😛 No idea if there are nice i18n go libraries ready to use for something like this.

Obviously if you end up going with this I can of course provide a Dutch translation.

[mtlynch]

Thanks for reaching out!

Yeah, this is too far outside the scope for me internationalization in the product natively, but I can try to help you get something working for your use case.

Changing the UI text is something you can do without much technical knowledge. You'd basically just need to open files and replace English text with Dutch text. Most of the UI is in the templates folder, so you'd change "Upload" to "Uploaden." Error messages and stuff would still be in English, and those are fixable too but a little more work to hunt them down in Go code.

How are you running PicoShare?

If you're just running it in Docker, you should be able to download the source for the latest release, unzip, replace English with Dutch, then run these commands in the directory you unzipped/modified:

# Build a Docker image from source.
docker build --tag picoshare .

# Run the image you created above.
docker run \
  --env "PORT=4001" \
  --env "PS_SHARED_SECRET=somesecretpass" \
  --publish 4001:4001/tcp \
  --volume "${PWD}/data:/data" \
  --name picoshare \
  picoshare

The downside is that every time you update to new versions of PicoShare, you have to re-do all your translations. There's a way to preserve your translations locally and still update somewhat painless by learning to use git, but that's a big step up in complexity.

[omkelderman]

oh I am a developer, just not a go developer (and I hate most things to do with frontend/web dev 😂, I'm a C# backend developer). So I could easily make a fork, do a search throughout the sourcecode, replace all text strings, and docker build & deploy that. I considered it, but I have a feeling the merge conflicts that will result in when I need to merge in an update that happens to mess with text in any way, would be very annoying to deal with 🤣.

So I figured lets see if there is a possibility for a localization engine to be included so I can just edit one resource file or whatever which is easily maintainable.

Anyway's, thank you for your answer. Maybe at some point in the future I'll go the git fork route, for now it isn't quite a big enough problem for me to go down that route. Might throw an AI at it at some point maybe, we'll see

[mtlynch]

Ah, gotcha.

Yeah, if you're already comfortable with source code and git, then it should be pretty easy. I don't change the UI very often, so I don't think you'd even have many merge conflicts. And for trivial ones like this, LLMs now are really good at resolving merge conflicts.