Re: gettext util

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 10:36:39PM +0000, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> On Mar/27/2010, Colin Watson wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I understand that you mean to use something like:
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/learnc/x948.html

I haven't read that particular document in detail, but yes, that's the
library and general pattern of code I mean.

Here's one of my examples, from a file chosen because it doesn't contain
very much else other than option parsing:

  
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~cjwatson/man-db/trunk/annotate/head%3A/src/lexgrog_test.c

> > > 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.
> 
> So, how it looks if I try to migrate to argp for the utils/* programs?
> 
> Probably I will not have lot of time on next days/weeks, but I will try
> to migrate one of the utils/ program to discuss on it and then do the
> same with the other ones.

I'm not one of the maintainers, but I think that would be a good idea.

> Unless someone complains (please, do soon rather than later :-) ) that
> argp would introduce some problems. I'm thinking with portability
> problems or something like this.

As far as I know it should be fine; it's in Gnulib, which strives for
portability and is generally much more clueful about it than most
projects, so I'd give it good odds of being portable.  I'm not deeply
familiar with how GRUB imports Gnulib code; it can't be quite standard
since we don't use Automake, so perhaps Vladimir should comment on
whether there are difficulties with any particular modules.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden