Re: gettext util

[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hi,

On Mar/27/2010, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 09:42:37PM +0000, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> > I have not seen any program (again, yet, maybe Grub will be the first
> > one) to split the messages in this way.
> 
> man-db does this, and it's fantastic.  It vastly reduces the number of
> translation changes I have to deal with.  It wasn't practical until I
> switched to the argp option parsing library which deals with a lot of
> the presentation issues, so that may be why a lot of programs that just
> use simple help output functions don't do it, but certainly as a
> maintainer it's vastly easier once it's done, and I haven't heard any
> complaints from translators.

I understand that you mean to use something like:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/learnc/x948.html

> > b) Makes the alignment more difficult
> 
> argp deals with this, and it's in Gnulib.  We could import it without
> too much difficulty.

I like this idea

> > c) Makes the code a bit less clear
> 
> IME the code is actually rather clearer with argp.  You can look at
> man-db if you'd like to compare.  In fact, I'd encourage that - it
> would give us a common basis for discussion.

I will look into that

> > Comment: sadly our grub.po already has someo of these long messages.
> > Would you change it and "force" the translators to change?
> 
> Well, such a change would be one-time and would be not much more
> painful than any addition of an option under the long-message system.

So, how it looks if I try to migrate to argp for the utils/* programs?

Probably I will not have lot of time on next days/weeks, but I will try
to migrate one of the utils/ program to discuss on it and then do the
same with the other ones.

Unless someone complains (please, do soon rather than later :-) ) that
argp would introduce some problems. I'm thinking with portability
problems or something like this.

Cheers,

-- 
Carles Pina i Estany
        http://pinux.info