Re: [RFC/PATCH] i18n of multi-line messages

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 00:55, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Nice. Thanks for tackling this. I'll no doubt be submitting some of
these myself once we start getting translations.

This is not a regression, but note that something like this:

+               fprintf(stderr, "%s%.*s\n", _("hint: "), (int)(np - cp), cp);

Isn't going to cut it for RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic, since
for them the "hint: " would effectively be at the end of the line.

I think the easiest way to tackle that sort of thing is to just do:

    _("hint: %.*s\n")

And have a TRANSLATORS comment indicating that the format string
should be kept, but that translators can move around the "hint", GNU
gettext also has a msgcheck feature to check that format strings are
compatible in the translations.