Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Localise error headers

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 3:37 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:28:42AM -0800, Stefan Beller wrote:
>
>> > And then presumably that mix would gradually move to 100% consistency as
>> > more messages are translated. But the implicit question is: are there
>> > die() messages that should never be translated? I'm not sure.
>>
>> I would assume any plumbing command is not localizing?
>> Because in plumbing land, (easily scriptable) you may find
>> a grep on the output/stderr for a certain condition?
>
> That's the assumption I'm challenging. Certainly the behavior and
> certain aspects of the output of a plumbing command should remain the
> same over time. But error messages to stderr?

In an ideal world that assumption would hold true and any machine
readable information from the plumbing commands are on stdout and
nobody in their sane mind would ever try to parse stderr.

There is no easy way to check though except auditing all the code.
Having pointed out some string handling mistakes in the prior email,
my confidence is not high that plumbing commands are that strict about
separating useful machine output and errors for human consumption.

>
> It seems like they should be translated, because plumbing invoked on
> behalf of porcelain scripts is going to send its stderr directly to the
> user.

Well that could be solved, c.f. unpack-trees.c lines 15-55.

As another data point (coming from that area of strings):
If you grep for these plumbing strings in the project,
i.e.
$ git grep "would be overwritten by merge. Cannot merge"
$ git grep "not uptodate. Cannot merge."
...

you only find the occurrence in the  unpack-trees.c lines 15-55,
which means our test suite at least doesn't grep for error messages
but relies on the exit code of plumbing commands(?!)

>
>> To find a good example, "git grep die" giving me some food of though:
>>
>> die_errno(..) should always take a string marked up for translation,
>> because the errno string is translated?
>
> Yes, I would think die_errno() is a no-brainer for translation, since
> the strerror() will be translated.
>
>>     apply.c:                die(_("internal error"));
>>
>> That is funny, too. I think we should substitute that with
>>
>>     die("BUG: untranslated, but what went wrong instead")
>
> Yep. We did not consistently use "BUG:" in the early days. I would say
> that "BUG" lines do not need to be translated. The point is that nobody
> should ever see them, so it seems like there is little point in giving
> extra work to translators.
>
> -Peff