Re: gnu hello bug report

[Karl Berry]

Hi Nicolas,

    -- expected behaviour:
    zapp ~ # hello -n -g moin
    +------+
    | moin |
    +------+

I understand why you would expect this, but it's behaving as
documented.  From the "Invoking" node of the manual:

  `-n'
       Output `Hello, world!', but possibly including box-drawing...

Note, it is specifically outputting the fixed string "Hello, world!",
and does not say "output the string specified by other options with
box-drawing characters".


    obviously the command-line parser implemented in hello only honors
    the last option.

Indeed.  As intended and documented:

  If more than one of the greeting options (`-g', `-n', `-t', and
  their long-named equivalents) is specified, whichever comes last takes
  precedence.


    to a quick fix, or, if that is not possible, at least some kind of a
    workaround,

That would imply dynamically translating (or rather "box-ifying") an
arbitrary string.  That's not going to happen.  The special strings for
-n are created by human translators and included in the program at build
time, not created on the fly by software.

     For some reason, the ebuild "app-misc/hello" is masked in the
     gentoo packaging system. maybe this hints to some bug or
     incompatibility in general.
 
I know nothing about Gentoo's practices.

Greetings,
karl