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

[David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com>]

2010/4/23 Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>:
> Can you alter the tab size on the console / terminal?

Yes you can, official only in virtual consoles but with a little trick
it works basically everywhere (= in a konsole / xterm / whatever)
dsklap:~$ echo -e 'This is a tab:\tYes'
This is a tab:  Yes
dsklap:~$ TERM=linux setterm -regtabs 10
dsklap:~$ echo -e 'This is a tab:\tYes'
This is a tab:      Yes
(more fun if you add in between tabstops with -tabs)

Even if we would assume tabs have always width X we would
still need to calculate the tabstops as we need to check if both
strings are in the same tabstop or not. This is maybe not much more
complicated for an application to calculate but a translator will have
hard times counting tabstops to align both correctly…
(but i would either way free the translator from such a burden)

I prefer spaces as even if a script depends highly on the output
it is more likely that it will break with a \t instead of a space
compared to X spaces instead of one.

Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

David Kalnischkies