Re: [PATCH 00/11] [RFH] Introduce support for GETTEXT_POISON=rot13

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 08:47:31AM +0000, Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget wrote:

> Ævar suggested recently
> [https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqim836v6m.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com/T/#m6fdc43d4f1eb3f20f841096c59e985b69c84875e]
> that this whole GETTEXT_POISON business is totally useless.
> 
> I do not believe that it is useless. To back up my belief with something
> tangible, I implemented a GETTEXT_POISON=rot13 mode and ran the test suite
> to see whether we erroneously expect translated messages where they aren't,
> and related problems.
> 
> And the experiment delivered. It is just a demonstration (I only addressed a
> handful of the test suite failures, 124 test scripts still need to be
> inspected to find out why they fail), of course. Yet I think that finding
> e.g. the missing translations of sha1dc-cb and parse-options show that it
> would be very useful to complete this patch series and then use the rot13
> mode in our CI jobs (instead of the current GETTEXT_POISON=true mode, which
> really is less useful).

I'm not entirely convinced by this. The original point of the poison
code was not to find opportunities to translate strings, but to make
sure we did not accidentally translate a string that some script was
relying on. And I don't see any fixes for the latter here (and as Ævar
suggested in the linked thread, the fact that we're not combing through
existing code looking for translations makes such an error a lot less
likely).

Which isn't to say repurposing it in the other direction might not be
worthwhile. But I suspect a lot of the test failures are just false
positives. Until now it was always reasonable to conservatively use
test_i18ngrep for cases which could reasonably translated, even if they
were not yet.

Likewise, I'm not sure that one can reliably rot13 an output for
test_i18ncmp. It could contain mixed translated and untranslated bits
from different messages.

So I dunno. You did find two spots where translations could be used.
But if nobody actually saw them to care that they got translated, were
they important? I may be a bit biased as somebody who would not use the
translations in the first place, of course.

-Peff