Re: Another raw idea for lintian check: variable substitution in debconf templates

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> writes:

> Yet another idea popping up in my mind. I'm in a lintian mood today..:)

Yay!  :)

> Some debconf templates use variable substitution (along with debconf's
> SUBST command) to incorporate context-variable text in debconf
> templates.
>
> Description: Do you want to erase disk ${DISK}?
>  Blah blah blah
>
> Translators MUST keep these variables unchanged in their translation
> and a very common mistake is translating them. French example:
>
> "Voulez-vous effacer le disque ${DISQUE}?"
>
> The result will be the variable popping up untranslated which is very
> disturbing and confusing for users (particularly in that case!).
>
> In D-I "spellchecker", we added such check for "bad variable
> substitution" and it catched many such errors.

Sure, that sounds like a good idea to me.  Should we trigger on anything
in a lintian template that looks like ${DISK}?  Would $DISK also be valid,
or are the curly braces required?

> I'm sorry for not being technically able to provide the appropriate
> patch to lintian for this but that could deserve some attention.

I assume that something like the following pseudocode would work:

    foreach pofile in debian/po/*.po
        foreach msgid, msgstr in pofile
            vars_needed = find_variables(msgid)
            vars_found  = find_variables(msgstr)
            if (not empty(msgstr) and vars_needed != vars_found)
                tag 'variable-mismatch-in-translation', pofile, line
            end
        end
    end

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>