Re: RFC: shorten translatable messages, eliminate fuzzy, and more
On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Alexey Mahotkin wrote:
> > I would like to discuss the proposal of splitting gettextable messages
> > in dpkg in lesser chunks, probably of string or couple of strings in
> > length.
>
> This comes up on occasion and I always refuse for a simple reason:
> it means that when I change something in the code you will suddenly
> end up with messages that are partially English, partially another
> language. That is is extremely confusing for users, so to prevent that
> from happening we use large messages.
Well, that is not a fully correct viewpoint either. The code should see if
all parts are available in the target locale, and only if they are, use them.
Otherwise, all parts should fall back on some default.
> > As for the downsizing of .po-files, I think that we could actually
> > _not_ mark _every_ string as translatable. There is a lot of messages
> > that are actually "should never happen"-style. E.g., I really think
> > that "unable to ignore signal %d before running %.250s" should always
> > be in English. That way, the innocent user can simply cut-and-paste
> > the error message, and file a bug report, without re-running the
> > failed operation with LC_MESSAGES=C (and you will have to explain that
> > operation to him first! and the failure could be not reproducible!).
>
> Internal errors are not translated, ones that can be caused by outside
> factors are useful information for users and definitely should be
> translated.
Are we sure that ALL error messages aren't translated? As someone walked the
code? I know how easy it is to cut-n-waste lines, and not understand that it
is an error condition that is being printed(I have done it before).
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