Bug#578657: apt-cache policy should use TABs in format string to ease l10n

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Ralf Gesellensetter & Julian Andres Klode,
>
> First of all i need to say: Nice find, i have looked at the output
> many times now but never saw the obvious?
>
>> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 05:23:28PM +0200, RalfGesellensetter wrote:
>>> .... suffering readability. Hence I suggest using TABs in the original format string,
>>> as you cannot assume that same word lengths will be given for any locale.
>>> The current state means discrimination of non-English languages ;)
>
> TABs have a problem in cases like:
> holly insane long Installed translation: 0.7.25.3
> shortcandidate: 0.7.25.3
> (how long is a tab? 4, 8 or 2¼ characters?)

Can you alter the tab size on the console / terminal?

> Consequence: We can only use spaces for alignment.

That isn't really the problem. The problem is that with tabs you still
have to align the translations for the two lines. It makes it likely
that the same number of tabs will work but does in no way garantie
that. E.g. in your above case the shortcandidate needs several tabs and
translators won't know about it any more than they know about adding
spaces.

MfG
        Goswin