msgctxt (was Re: String changes in Evolution)

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

(Edited the subject from
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2008-August/msg00036.html in
order to make it a little more obvious)

On 8/4/08, Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net> wrote:
> Petr Kovar píše v Po 04. 08. 2008 v 21:38 +0200:
> > Speaking for myself, I'd prefer to wait until Poedit
>  > can support the change. Just because of software; I don't know whether the
>  > fact that the migration is still a proposal only really matters in relation
>  > to Evolution.
>
> msgctxt "ignoring" has been included for poedit 1.3.8. There is no UI to
>  display msgctxt yet, see the bug report[1]. This means that msgctxt is
>  neither deleted nor displayed[2],[3]. ;-)
>
>  As Kenneth has already written, there are 18 bugs[4] in GNOME's po files
>  because translators just don't understand to strip "context|". I guess
>  the number of unreported bugs is even bigger.
>
>
>  > But surely other voices should be heard, too. I don't intend
>  > to be solely anti-progress in any case. :-)
>
> Come on Petr, somebody HAS to play the bad guy! :-P
>
>  Well, I don't think we should wait for one special application to get
>  fixed... KDE also didn't care about poedit (some people may accept this
>  as an argument, some may not). gtranslator and KBabel/KAider (hmm,
>  according to Chusslove Illich, KAider has been renamed to "Lokalize" for
>  KDE 4.1) do support msgctxt.
>
>  andre
>
>  [1] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1680554&group_id=27043&atid=389153
>  [2] http://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=120108425114004&w=2
>  [3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2008-January/msg00215.html
>  [4] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=context&product=l10n&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO

I'm personally all for suggesting the msgctxt migration as an official
GNOME goal for GNOME 2.26
(http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/MsgctxtMigration). As Andre pointed
out, the behavior of the current Q_ macro in glib is error prone to
translators and causing a lot of problems and real bugs.

We cannot wait for a particular po editor to have support for msgctxt.
There are plenty of tools and if one doesn't do the job there are
plenty of alternatives, including using a bare bones text editor if
necessary.

The more important thing IMHO is the toolkits (glib, gettext,
intltool, pootle, translate toolkit, Damned Lies, Launchpad, etc). All
of these seem fine, however.

A big question is however support for msgctxt on platforms that do not
use GNU gettext. I guess this includes Solaris and the like. IMHO the
gettext implementations on those platforms should be fixed to support
msgctxt anyway, but in any case it should probably be taken into
consideration for the GNOME goal. If there are any Solaris or
OpenSolaris folks lurking on this list that know about the state of
gettext and support for msgctxt on those platforms, please chime in.
I'm cc:ing Willie Walker since I know for sure, based on info from
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/MsgctxtMigration, that Orca will be
affected by msgctxt anyway. ;-)


Christian