RFC: Renovate the remote-loader

[andrii-bodnar]

@lingui/remote-loader is a package that allows loading and compiling message catalogs located somewhere remotely (for example, an external CDN endpoint).

For some reason, it was marked as private and the latest published version is 3.11.0.

Today, almost every Localization Management System has an Over-The-Air Content Delivery feature that allows translations to be distributed to a CDN (or other resources located on the web) and then applications can consume these translations directly from the remote endpoint. For example, this is how it works in Crowdin - Content Delivery.

In short, OTA Content Delivery allows new translations to be delivered without necessarily rebuilding or redeploying the application. So the Remote Loader would be a good complement to OTA technologies.

Possible steps to do:

• Review the codebase, actualize it
• Add docs for the package
• Update and fix README.md
• Make it public

[timofei-iatsenko]

Currently, the only one problem here, it doesn't support any other formats except of minimal. To make it work with all formats, custom formatters should be integrated in this loader.

By the way, Pofile would be tricky to bundle for for the browser because it has require('fs'), one more point for adopting and maintaining https://github.com/thekip/pofile under lingui org

[andrii-bodnar]

I wonder if this should be considered every time someone creates a custom formatter. What about other formatters? Are they compatible with this?

[timofei-iatsenko]

Yes, it should be considered when someone creates a custom formatter. Formatters shouldn't have any browser-incompatibile dependencies. Other official lingui formatters are compatible with browser.

[andrii-bodnar]

Are there any other currently supported pofile alternatives? Maybe it would be better to switch library

I've found https://www.npmjs.com/package/gettext-parser, but I'm not sure if it works in browsers

[andrii-bodnar]

@thekip I just thought if Pofile is a blocker in the current case, we probably can adopt its fork under the Lingui organization

[andrii-bodnar]

Now Crowdin can provide already compiled translations via OTA CDN - Lingui String Exporter