Re: gettext util

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 09:42:37PM +0000, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> I have not seen any program (again, yet, maybe Grub will be the first
> one) to split the messages in this way.

man-db does this, and it's fantastic.  It vastly reduces the number of
translation changes I have to deal with.  It wasn't practical until I
switched to the argp option parsing library which deals with a lot of
the presentation issues, so that may be why a lot of programs that just
use simple help output functions don't do it, but certainly as a
maintainer it's vastly easier once it's done, and I haven't heard any
complaints from translators.

> b) Makes the alignment more difficult

argp deals with this, and it's in Gnulib.  We could import it without
too much difficulty.

> c) Makes the code a bit less clear

IME the code is actually rather clearer with argp.  You can look at
man-db if you'd like to compare.  In fact, I'd encourage that - it would
give us a common basis for discussion.

> Comment: sadly our grub.po already has someo of these long messages.
> Would you change it and "force" the translators to change?

Well, such a change would be one-time and would be not much more painful
than any addition of an option under the long-message system.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden