Re: 3.0 branch: POTFILES.in broken

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Joseph" == Joseph S Myers <jsm28@cam.ac.uk> writes:

Joseph> When rewriting parts of the format checking code, I wondered
Joseph> whether some of the uses there might pose i18n problems, e.g.

I think so.

Joseph> The first two names here are such things as "precision" or
Joseph> "length modifier" (the third is something like "printf" to
Joseph> which i18n doesn't apply).  If the translations of these words
Joseph> get declined differently in different places in the sentence
Joseph> or in different warning messages, there would be the problem
Joseph> of providing a single translation of "precision" that works in
Joseph> all places.  I don't know whether e.g. ngettext could be
Joseph> misused if this problem arises.

In general it is probably better to just rewrite the code.
Uli wrote a paper describing the various problems one might
encounter here.  I forget where it is though.

Another problem with this approach, beyond declensions and the like,
is that it is still hard for a translator: in the PO file there will
be a string like `%s ignored with %s in %s format', and then somewhere
else there will be `length modifier'.  The difficulty arises when the
translator isn't easily able to discover that these two phrases are
related.

Tom