Re: advice on po/pot/po4a layout etc. [and 1 more messages]

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Thanks for your helpful comments earlier.  I have now done much of the
work to do message translation for the dgit package.  The results are
now in experimental, and can be found here:
  https://browse.dgit.debian.org/dgit.git/tree/?h=debian/7.0_pre1
or with `dgit clone dgit experimental'.

I'm still working on marking up git-debrebase for message translation,
and haven't done anything about the docs.  When I have done those
things, and subject to any review comments I get here, I intend to
call it 7.0 and upload to sid.

Comments welcome, particularly on the file po/README.
  https://browse.dgit.debian.org/dgit.git/tree/po/README?h=debian/7.0_pre1


I am considering creating a salsa repo for translation merge requests,
by analogy with what was done for debian-policy:
  https://salsa.debian.org/dbnpolicy/policy-l10n-merge-requests-here

If I do create such a repo, I will probably rebase PR branches onto my
own master, rather than using `git merge', because I prefer to make
the history more linear-looking.  Would that be a problem ?

It occurs to me that maybe this kind of thing should be in a
translation teams salsa project, and a standard naming convention,
etc.

I even wonder whether it would be sensible to make some kind of
automatic dgit-based mirroring setup so that translators can work in a
uniform way, with git, on any package.  Of course a translator can
just use `dgit clone' right now, and `git-send-email' or something to
file their results in the Debian BTS, but that doesn't give a pretty
web ui.


One difficulty is that I am very much in the habit of constructing my
error messages out of pieces.  This is recommended against in the
gettext manual, and I understand the reasons.  However, the
prescription to make each message be a whole sentence is impractical
from an implementation point of view:

Both because it's impractical to write the source code that way (since
in neither the places where the message fragments are generated, and
where they are consumed, have is there enough information to be able
write down that whole sentence); and because it would result in many
cases in a combinatorial explosion of different message strings
(sometimes with different combinations of %-substitutions etc.)

I hope that in languages where inflection and agreement are important,
translators will be willing to fudge this, and that users of my
programs (the latter being - at least sort-of - programmers) will be
able to cope with the resulting odd-sounding messages.  I guess these
kind of problems are hardly new.


Regards,
Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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