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

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> ! # define AUTHORS5(author1, author2, author3, author4, author5) \
> !   xasprintf (_("Written by %s, %s, %s, %s and %s."), \
> !          author1, author2, author3, author4, author5)

I doubt whether this approach will work well enough in practice to
justify its complexity.  Its complexity may well confuse translators,
and it won't handle the 80-column limit well.

Translators could use a hack like the following to get around the
problem without changing coreutils:

   msgid "Written by %s.\n"
   msgstr "%s\n"

   msgid "Bruno Haible and Paul Eggert"
   msgstr "Haible Eggert ja kirjoittaneet Bruno Paul desu ka."

(pardon my French :-).

However, I'm afraid that the "right" thing to do, from a viewpoint of
helping the translators, is to grit our teeth and rewrite the code so
that "Written by Bruno Haible and Paul Eggert." is a single string,
that is translated all at once.  This is simple and effective, and
it's what I did in diffutils and tar.

Gary's original patch does that too, though as I mentioned I think
"authors" should be changed to "written_by" in that patch.

It would make sense to automate the generation of author lists if
there were multiple ways that we needed to list authors, and we wanted
a single set of authors from which these multiple lists are generated.
But we don't need that, and it would be a hassle to do it well.