Re: Translation issues with strftime

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm@commsecure.com.au> writes:

[...]

> It is completely undocumented behaviour for strftime(), though. It
> happens to work, but the strftime(3) page mentions nothing about the
> modifier.

This is not true. GNU projects are not supposed to use man pages,
really. If you look in the info help, it is documented:

     ... by an optional flag which can be one of the following.  These flags
     are all GNU extensions. The first three affect only the output of
     numbers:
                                                                                
    `_'
          The number is padded with spaces.
                                                                                
    `-'
          The number is not padded at all.
                                                                                
    [...]

    
The reason it is in the Danish translation, is IIRC that some of the
original strings once used the %-d. Of course, if it breaks things, I
have to remove it. Sigh.

> If it is really important that those strings don't have a leading zero
> for locale-specific reasons, shouldn't the original string be %X and %x,
> as appropriate, rather than some tricked out version as is there
> currently?

The leading zero just looks bad. I hate it everytime I see it in the
English version, too. When where the last time you wrote a date with
zero padding?

Unfortunately, %e is a bad solution. I don't need an extra space:

  tir 02. dec
  tir  2. dec

I just want "tir 2. dec".

Could we please fix the software instead? This bug seems to have a
solution:

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122748

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/