Re: RFC: shorten translatable messages, eliminate fuzzy, and more
On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 01:02:48AM +0200, 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.
And I don't understand why. You did not convinc me last time, so I try again
;)
Following this way, the only languages uploaded with the binary should be
the ones translating *all* strings (no fuzzy, no untranslated in po file),
because if it's not done, the user may see several strings in the dselect
menu, for example, or on message of dpkg will be translated (Reading DB),
and the next not (214423154 files installed).
My point of view is that the user *will* see mixed languages, unless we (the
translators) are perfect, which is not true, sadly.
So, I don't understand why you don't want to ease our work as translators.
And moreover, as user, I prefer to see some part in english and some part in
french than anything in english...
> > String of such a "length" are extremely hard to update in .po-files.
> > There is mostly no way to see what exactly changed: you will have to
> > keep somewhere an exact copy of dpkg sources that were used for last
> > update of .po-file, and look at the diffs between two sources.
>
> You should be able to tell that easily from the CVS diffs.
Sure, but I offen translate off-line (so, whithout CVS), and there is no
tool in the gettext world to automate the diff (because the old string and
the new one are there when the new pot and the old po file are merged. But
that's not the good list to discuss the gettext functionnalities).
> > While it is not resolved, I would recommend Wichert _not_ to update
> > .po-file, unless it is sent by a respective translator.
>
> I don't tend to update those files actually, maybe once every few
> months I run an update.sh to get some new translations statistics.
I think it's bad. Why not adding something to debian/rules to have these
files updated while the binary is builded ? I know, the gettext familly
change the generation date of the pot, even if no change where done. So, it
tends to add pollution to CVS. You may be interrested with the po/Makefile
in the debconf package, which solve this problem.
Bye, Mt.
Reply to: