Re: UTF-8 strings; plurals; qt-format

[Daniel Elstner <daniel kitta googlemail com>]

Hi Danilo and everyone,

Am Montag, den 08.01.2007, 11:47 +0100 schrieb Danilo Šegan:
> Today at 1:17, Daniel Elstner wrote:
> 
> > Shall I do so?  This would require changes to each and every .po file,
> > of course.  Would it be alright if I do a mass search/replace on all .po
> > files myself?  (Of course using regexxer itself for the job!)  Come to
> > think of it, if I do the mass search replace I might as well commit the
> > results of intltool-update, no?  Please advise, I really don't want to
> > disrupt anybody's work.
> 
> Just announcing it on gnome-i18n prior to doing any change (so
> translators can commit their unfinished work, and stop doing anything
> new) should be enough.  And yes, it would be best if you did the
> conversion of PO files yourself.

Alright.  I'll commit these changes tomorrow, some time after 21:00 UTC.
I'll take the pain of reverting changes to a particular .po file if its
translator didn't read this message in time; just mail me.

> Running intltool-update in such a scenario and committing the results
> might as well be acceptable, but I wouldn't worry about it: is there
> any particular reason you'd want to run it?

Incurable perfectionist silliness.  Though one legitimate reason would
be to get rid of entries in the .po files for a couple of messages that
have been removed, so they don't end up as ghosts in the installed .mo
files.

> >     msgid ""
> >     "Error in regular expression at \"%1\" (index %2):\n"
> >     "%3"
> 
> This message doesn't require ngettext call.  In general, messages
> which have a number attached to a noun or pronoun, and where number is
> used for counting (eg. "%1 matches") need ngettext.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.  Though I was partly talking
nonsense anyway: the %1 above actually doesn't reference a number; in
fact the message would sound rather strange if it did.  Should get some
more sleep.

> Thanks for the notice :)  I also see that those strings are already
> marked as qt-format, so even running "msgfmt -c" locally would catch
> the problems :)

Yeah, I took care of that by passing the right XGETTEXT_OPTIONS via
Makevars.

> >         You can reorder substitutions!  This isn't possible with
> >         standard C89 printf without implementation-specific extensions.
> >         You could even reference an index more than once or not at all,
> >         but that probably isn't useful.
> 
> This is possible with POSIX extensions even to C89, so this is a
> non-argument :)  Yeah, it may look uglier, but that's all there is to
> it (%1$s, %2$d...).

Hmm, but does e.g. win32 printf() support it?  Anyway, at least with
regards to g_print() and friends you're right, since GLib ships with
gnulib printf replacements.

> As far as I see, only 2 messages have %2 in them, and both of them
> are of the error message/warning type with %2 being either after
> semicolon or in parenthesis (which is hardly suitable for reordering :).

Well, you have to understand, I'd sooo love someone to actually use the
feature I implemented :)

> This is more than appreciated: if all the developers announced their
> plans in the same way, and described the technology they use like
> this, it would be easier for translators to do their job (well, in
> most cases, we have standards on how to do things anyway, so that's
> part of the solution :)).

Now that's nice to hear.

Cheers,
--Daniel