Re: The translator credits

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 08:22:19AM +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> > Otherwise, I guess it would be rather sensible that one relies on the
> > MIME headers in the PO file header for the whole file, including the
> > value fields in the header itself.
> 
> This will confuse things.  As long as the header lines are looking like
> mail message header lines we should treat them as such, please.

No.

Mail headers are never read directly but showed by the mail program;
reading a quoted-printable (not "mime encoded" that means nothing) or base64
header is simply quite impossible.
Also, the reason for which quoted-printable or base64 is used in mail is
that there are still some stupid mail servers that are ascii-only.
That is not the case for po files; so obfuscating on purpose the headers
would be unneeded, and will be felt as just plain stupid by most translators;
that is, they won't do it anyway.

Think also that the header of a po file is just a msgstr entry like
another; if others are in clean 8bits; so why the header should be different.
 
> >From time to time I like to query a MO file to see who was the last
> translator.  In an 8859-1 environment this work pretty well.  But you'll
> start to see wierd result if you're working in an 8859-2 environment.
> Please try:
> 
>     xterm -fn '-*-*-medium-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-2'
> 
> and inside the new xterm call:
> 
>     LC_MESSAGES=pt gettext fileutils "" | grep Last-Translator
> 
> And you'll see that "João" is displayed wrongly as 
> `Jo?o'.

That is because the name is another encoding; but do you really thing that
*everybody* (and not only people like you requesting info from a file
in another language and another encoding) having an output like
'Jo=?qp?iso-8859-1?=e3?=o' is better ? 

Quoted-printable and base64 are bad; they only exist because of the even worst
attitude of some mail servers towards non-English languages.
But please, don't go on adopting such a dumb encoding when it is not needed. 

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975