Re: gettext util

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi Carles,

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 12:54:16AM +0000, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> > According to gettext manual usage messages must be internationalised on
> > per-option basis to allow reuse of e.g. --help desciption and to avoid
> > the whole big message to be marked as fuzzy if only one option changes.
> 
> I'm surprised, specially because if I get the gettext project as a
> reference:
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/gettext-runtime/src/gettext.c?id=c81a5234a673f6fbc0f8b7ea8f18ef73021b0a2e#n252
> 
> They are not doing. Other projects that I can remember where my LUG has
> done things (e.g. tar) is not done in this way.
> 
> I don't have any probem to change in Grub, I just wonder if people is
> expecting it :-/
> 
> I'm adding Jordi Mallach to the CC

Whether gettext itself is doing it or not, I'll stick to my experience.
As a translator, I am *really* fed up of trying to fish in a huge help
output to find a tiny change that made the whole string fuzzy and so on.

This is now less of a problem with the tools that support showing the
"previous" string (#|), but it's a huge pain nevertheless.

If you want to make translator's life easier, I'd totally go with
per option messages. If alignment is a problem (how?), I guess translation
comments could be useful to describe how the translated string should look
like.

I assume you mean:

  --help                          Show this help string.
  --eggs                          Get two eggs from the fridge, crack them
                                  and put them on hot olive oil.

It'd be difficult to align "Show" with "Get". I'd say that this depends a
lot on the editor you use. Emacs at least makes it easy to calculate if
you got it right or wrong.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
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