Re: c++/7765 [Patch]

[Zack Weinberg <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 05:47:49PM +0100, Wolfgang Bangerth wrote:
> 
> Zack, Michel,
> 
> > If this weren't in the translations it would qualify as an obvious
> > bugfix.  I would say, go ahead and check it in (with this change);
> 
> I can't, someone has to do that for me. Note also the changed comment in
> the patch, I believe the old one had an "and" and "or" confused.

Okay.  I will apply your comment change shortly, and use your script
to audit the .po files and clean them up.

> I'm presently about to do just that, with a small script. There are
> literally dozens of such cases in the danish translation, and at least ten
> more in the french one, where formats don't match (things are a little bit
> complicated, since a % might be followed by a charater that needs to be
> escaped in perl...).

Joy.

> I'm surprised nobody's been paying attention to this rather obvious
> problem.

msgfmt has logic to check for this stuff, but we can't use it because
it only knows about printf %-escapes, not our extensions.  And it
doesn't reliably know which strings are going to undergo printf
processing.  (The built-in heuristic of scanning strings for %[a-z] is
worse than useless, because a translation may introduce a % where
there wasn't one before.)

> Also, do I understand you correctly that the
> _order_ of formats needs to be preserved? (One would think so if things
> are called via functions with an ellipsis at the end.) This is going to be
> a headache for translators, because it restricts their choice of wording,
> and it can also not be checked automatically, if the same format appears
> more than once in the text.

Yes, the order of formats must presently be preserved.  I realize that
this interferes with proper translation.  What we need to do is
implement the SVR4 "%1$x" printf extension: this allows you to write

 msgid "statement about %d %s"
 msgstr "statement about %2$s in quantity %1$d"

(I will get to this eventually, but the list of things I will get to
eventually has items on it from 1998, so don't hold your breath.
Patches for diagnostic.c are welcome.)

zw