Proposal: CLI Utilities for Manipulating `.flt` Files

[hwhsu1231]

One of the most powerful aspects of Gettext is the comprehensive suite of command-line utilities it provides for handling .pot and .po files, such as:

• xgettext: Extracts translatable strings from source code.
• msgcat: Concatenates and merges message catalogs.
• msgmerge: Merges two disparate translation archives.
• ...and many others.

Therefore, I would like to propose the development of a similar set of native CLI utilities for Fluent to streamline the localization workflow. These might include:

• xfluent: To extract strings into Fluent files.
• fltcat: To concatenate multiple .flt files.
• fltmerge: To manage updates and merges between .flt files.
• ...and many others.

Providing these tools would allow developers to easily manipulate .flt files directly within scripts or CI/CD pipelines, significantly improving the developer experience for projects using Fluent as their localization system.

[eemeli]

Are you proposing to work on such CLI tools yourself, or are you looking to promote interest in others doing so?

For Mozilla's use in general, I've been recently adding some CLI tools to the moz-l10n library, which we use for Fluent as well as other localization file formats. That's mostly grown so far by addressing specific needs as they arise, so it's not necessarily (yet...) sufficient for general use.