Re: [PATCH/RFC v4 1/7] Add infrastructure for translating Git with gettext

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:11, Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se> wrote:
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason:
>
>> Making things like wt-status.c translatable is going to be hard to do
>> properly. It uses a lot of lego (sticking strings incrementally together),
>
> However, preparing them for translation is probably going to make them
> better anyway, as this kind of string building is incredibly brittle, even
> for English strings.

Yeah, but they aren't better as they are now. Personally I'd rather
incrementally add translation support correctly than do an incomplete
job of it and wait for the complaints (and subsequent fixes) to come
in.

But maybe that's counter-productive. Just making the English strings
translatable as-is is still going to make most of Git translatable,
and it isn't going to be that bad for languages like German and
French.

Maybe worse is better :)

> You also have to look out for pluralisation issues, fortunately Gettext does
> have support for the various types of plural forms that are used, so it
> should be possible. The problem is just identifying where they are needed.

Yeah. I'm going to support pluralisation (and maybe msgctxt) across
the C-Perl-Shell stack when there's a need for it. I haven't found any
message in Git yet that requires it, but then again I haven't looked
hard either.

It would be useful to have an example of a message that could use
pluralization, even better examples in all of C, Perl and Shell.

>> and due to the coloring of output this'll be particularly hard to convert.
>
> Is the colouring based on knowing the contents of the actual text, or is it
> enough to know the markers? I admit not having looked at the colouring code
> at all...

There's nothing wrong with coloring in particular, it's just that due
to the nature of the current implementation code that does coloring
ends up being a bad offender in the "assemble the strings a few bytes
at a time with strcat()" department.

That can be fixed, it just takes a bit of time and tedium.