Re: [sharutils] unwieldy msgids, unnecessary reformatting

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Bruce,

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013, at 1:40, Bruce Korb wrote:
> On 01/14/13 03:07, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> > Indeed it is not good to offer those
> > fragments for translation, but it would be perfectly okay to offer
> > each complete option description, for example the above:
> 
> > N_("   -B, --uuencode             treat all files as binary\n"
> > "                                - an alternate for mixed-uuencode\n")
> 
> Exactly my intention, actually.  A line starting with more than 8 spaces
> would be considered an extension of the previous "hanging indent" line.

Okay, very good.

> One other potentially translatable piece of text is the long option name.
> I know that no other programs translate them, but it turns out to be
> trivial to do so.  So in C locale:
> 
>    my-prog --first-option
> 
> could be used thus (in Spanish, my second language):
> 
>    my-prog --opcion-primero
> 
> my AutoOpts code doesn't care because it just looks up whatever bytes
> appear after the double hyphen and before any '=' character.  That
> does present problems with languages that embed the 0x3D character in
> their representations, but certainly all the Roman alphabet based
> languages *could* have their long options localized.  I've already
> implemented the capability, so my question boils down to:
> 
>    Is it too far over the top?  :)

Yes, that is completely over the top.  :)

The only other command-line program I know that translates part
of its interface, is 'parted'.  Only its (interactive) commands
are translatable, not its options nor the keyword arguments to
the commands.  But it will recognize both the original commands
and the translated ones.

I wouldn't make the program options translatable, it would only
lead to confusion -- for makers when they start getting bug reports
in Polish or Bulgarian, for users when they must first translate
a command found on the net to their localized options names (and
how to figure out which is which when you can't see them side by
side?).  It should even be impossible to translate the option names
-- they should be included in the explanatory help strings, but any
changes or typos in them (in those strings) should not affect their
recognition.

(It would be a nice feature if AutoOpts would detect such typos
in option names (in the help text) and emit an "ohoh".)

Regards,

Benno

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