On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 03:37 +0300, Eddy Petrisor wrote: > I agree with Konstantinos on this issue (and his proposal) and I would > like to add a few other remarks that I gathered during the painful > translation of dpkg before sarge's release: > At the disk of being confrontational, I actually don't agree with either of you. I think it's important that the English messages in dpkg be good, clear English. I do not believe that this should be sacrificed for the sake of making it easier for non-English speakers -- that's what the entire i18n effort is for, providing those people with their own native language version. On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 20:40 +0300, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote: > gobble replaced file `%.255s' > > I find the word 'gobble' highly untranslatable, at least not without > choosing a synonym. > I'm not sure what your point is here? If there's no direct word in your language, isn't choosing a synonym exactly what you ordinarily do? That's a pretty common word in British English, and "dict" provides many definitions (including the jargon file) that should be useful for translations. I would agree that the position of that translation is difficult, but that's a side-effect of the current internal API of dpkg which I do not think was ever designed with translatable strings in mind. So in effect, I agree that "X is not a clear English message" is a valid bug; and I agree that "this string is incomplete, and not translatable" is a valid bug (cf. "unable to %s"); but I do not agree that "I can't translate this because I don't understand the English" is a bug -- that's what dictionaries are for. On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 03:37 +0300, Eddy Petrisor wrote: > for upstream: > > dpkg --print-installation-architecture print host architecture > (for inst'n)\n > inst'n = installation/installations? > Installation -- this shortening is unfortunate though. Note that this string is removed anyway. > multiple spaces: > dpkg, string 432 (main/main.c:154) > "... in this run ! Only co..." > dpkg, string 313 (main/enquiry.c:96) > "...nstallation. The ins..." > I'm not sure what your point is here? Two spaces after a full-stop is correct, one would not be? > please stop silly quoting stile! "`" is NOT the pair of "'" > GNU standards say otherwise, and dpkg has always used them. > can it get more cyptical than this? > dpkg, string 241 (main/configure.c:175) > "unable to stat new dist conffile `%.250s'" > > What the hell am I supposed to understand from this? > Can you please full _English_ words? > stat is not a verb > Correct, it's a syscall. This error is reporting the failure of a syscall, so has to use the name of the syscall that failed, obviously. > dist is not a substantive > yes, this word is not useful. > conffile is not a substantive. > conffile is a (dpkg) jargon term used to describe a particular type of configuration file; again, as this message is reporting a failure, clarity of problem is more important. So this message is telling you that the stat() syscall on a conffile (something in DEBIAN/conffiles) failed. > "Version of dpkg with working epoch support not yet configured.\n" > Please use _English_ language. Please use full blown sentences > Did you mean: "A version of dpkg ...." or "The version of dpkg...." or > "There is is no version of dpkg..."? > This is entirely valid English, there is no definite or indefinite article because it's referring to a definite member of an indefinite set. There are many versions of dpkg with working epoch support, so "The version" would be wrong. However you have chosen a particular one to install, so "A version" would also be wrong. If one needs to be definite, one could use something like: "The half-installed version of dpkg, which has the working epoch support you need, has not yet been configured." However that's rather unnecessarily prissy. > "dpkg not recorded as installed, cannot check for epoch support !\n" > "dpkg is not recorded as installed, so I cannot check for epoch > support !\n or what? > This is entirely valid English. For dpkg to use the term "I" would be incorrect English (though correct in most other IE languages, at least). > "compiler libgcc filename not understood: %.250s" > What do you mean? who does not understand? whose filename? > No idea ;) that's a bad message :p Scott -- Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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