Re: Before l10n, better practices for (message) ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 23, 2017, at 9:59, Tino Calancha <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 May 2017, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> I just bumped into an English/code bug this morning. In package.el, when 1 
>> package is not needed anymore, the message is:
>> 
>> "Package menu: Operation finished.  1 packages are no longer needed, type 
>> ‘M-x package-autoremove’ to remove them"
...
>> So I'm asking whether do we have "best practices" for using messages...
> This was discussed in
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-09/msg00502.html
> 
> I proposed to add a simple function `string-plural-s' to standarize those
> plurarizations.

Yes, but no.

As a person who pays his bills doing translation and l10n, I would *never* 
recommend to create UI strings programatically based on *grammatical* 
assumptions. In fact I would forbid that if I could :) And I think that should 
be an Emacs policy for all UI strings...

I'm currently going through package.el and the easiest solution I have for now 
is replace things like "%d package%s to install" (where %s is "s" depending on 
whether %d is greater than 1...) into "Number of packages to install: %d.".

The packages.el authors have created incredible messages where "ing" is 
replaced by "ed" depending on whether the process is running or completed, just 
so as to save a few lines of static strings. Of course, the code is very 
clever, but if we want to create a base for l10n one day, all these clever 
grammatical hacks must permanently go away...

So, as I just wrote, I'm working on package.el right now and I'll submit a 
patch, and when I'm done, I'd like to see what kind of mechanisms we have (or 
we need to create) to extract strings and use localized ressources.

Jean-Christophe