Re: [Bug-gnulib] 4-gary-version-etc-full-author-string.patch

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Bruno Haible wrote:
> Jim Meyering wrote:
> > >         printf (_("Written by %s."), AUTHOR1);
> > >         printf (_("Written by %s and %s."), AUTHOR1, AUTHOR2);
> > >         printf (_("Written by %s, %s and %s."), AUTHOR1, AUTHOR2,
> > > AUTHOR3); etc.

These msgids are good for me.

> How about the appended patch? With it, you change each AUTHORS definition,
> like this:
>
> #define AUTHORS N_ ("Joseph Arceneaux, David MacKenzie, and Kaveh Ghazi")
> ->
> #define AUTHORS AUTHORS3 ("Joseph Arceneaux", "David MacKenzie", "Kaveh Ghazi")
>
> This is not more work for you than what you proposed. And it keeps the
> friendly natural language for the user.

Again, this solves my i18n concerns.  However, I have only 1 line of code to 
change whatever happens, so Jim gets the casting vote.

From an interface point of view, I think that I would rather see a variadic 
version_etc() (or an argv array of author names for the last argument) than a 
set of macros.  Eg:

   #define AUTHORS "Joseph Arceneaux", "David MacKenzie", "Kaveh Ghazi"

   ...
   version_etc (stdout, "foo", 0, "0.0.1a", AUTHORS)

The function could then collect and count the AUTHORS and select an 
appropriate msgid at runtime, or botch together a good approximation if some 
package with 30 authors uses it...

Cheers,
        Gary.
--
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