Re: Bug reporting question

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 16:19, Christian Rose wrote:
> tis 2003-04-22 klockan 23.27 skrev Captain Rotundo:
> > I just filed my first bug against an error in a string, and it got me
> > thinking.  While working through some packages there are occassionally
> > strings whose meaning are vague at best, and sometimes take
> > investigation to determine what they mean.
> > 
> > for example strings that use the word "set" without making it clear if
> > the meaning is "a grouping" or "selected" -- this may not be the worst
> > situation, but there have been others that are far more confusing (at
> > least to me) - should I file bugs against these strings? or is the
> > wording the original author chooses his perogative? 
> 
> The developers decides themselves what wording to use, but we have
> guidelines in GNOME (see the terminology sections of
> http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/) and many developers
> are in my experience just not aware what guidelines exist and that they
> could have used the suggested terminology instead, and are happy to
> change to that once they are made aware of it.
> 
> So file bug reports whenever you see strings that could be improved, and
> use the style guide as a reference for suggested terminology where you
> can.
> 
> 

The style guide in particular has a good discussion of how to write in a
way that avoids the ambiguity that makes translation tricky:

http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/locale.html

It's aimed primarily at docs, but is quite applicable to UI as well.

Cheers,
John
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck@inkstain.net (h) jfleck@abqjournal.com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net http://www.abqjournal.com
http://www.gnome.org/learn/users-guide/latest/

"Not only isn't reality real - it's an illusion created by unreal people to
sell real people unnecesary cars." - Griffy