Forum OpenACS Development: Preseving locally modified catalog files

There are cases where message key translations are locally modified by an installation of OpenACS or .LRN.

In most cases you want to safely preserve your local changes when upgrading OpenACS.

It seems like it is possible to save locally modified keys in a different file ie: acs-kernel.en_US.ISO-8859-1.local.xml or something similar.

Then the code that imports the keys could override any keys in the "official" file with the locally modified ones. It should be possible to show an interface that let's and administrator compare the locally modified keys to the standard ones.

This should provide a straightforward way to preserve local modifications and let a user decide if new translations should change their locally modified ones without requiring alot of command line work with cvs, diff etc.

Comments?

I'd love a solution to this. I just went through this with a client in active development and how can we let the user make changes to the translations, but still allow for added (mostly) or modified keys from the ongoing development.

What clients would like to do is
a) change their keys on production. So we need a solution that will take the keys they have modified on production and not modify them, but add new keys and modify keys that haven't change.

b) allow them some sort of participation in the development phase and ensure their changes from development get into the production release.

If we had that, we'd rock :)

Sounds good. We can add a column to the table that holds the keys so it can be marked as local or eligigle to be contributed back to openacs.

Sounds like we have enough information to start this.

Who can write a TIP and the code for this?