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Translating copyright info in --version commands?



Hello,

we have lots of translatable strings containing just copyright
information. I'm not quite sure why those strings are translatable but
I can imagine that it was meant so that translators can add themselves
to the list. In practice, none of the translators have been doing this.

On the other hand, some translators have used this opportunity to replace
"(C)" by the UTF-8 character "©".

I always find it a pity that those strings are tagged as translatable.
Instead of properly updating the copyright information, I tend to leave
the strings alone to avoid useless churn on translators.

I would like to fix this. Here are some suggestions.

1/ The easiest solution (but not so clean one):
   Drop the _g() and leave the strings as is.

2/ Replace all those printf() calls by a new function which takes as
   input all the copyright holders (together with the associated years)
   and let it output the full copyright string. If it detects
   an UTF-8 locale (with nl_langinfo), it would use "Copyright © " +
   <argument>, otherwise it uses the ASCII variant "Copyright (C) " +
   <argument>.
   
   copyright("2006-2009 Guillem Jover", "2008-2012 Raphael Hertzog", NULL);

3/ Like 2 but on top of this, we add the possibility for translators to add
   themselves. For this, the copyright() function would call
   pgettext("translator-copyright", "") to retrieve the data, it would
   split on new lines and do the same work than for normal copyright
   holders.

   (Or this could be moved to a separate function)
   (I have not checked whether pgettext() works with an empty string but I
   would expect so, otherwise it's still possible to use a fake marker and
   to skip it if we detect it)


What do you think?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

Pre-order a copy of the Debian Administrator's Handbook and help
liberate it: http://debian-handbook.info/liberation/


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