Re: [PATCH] Revert diffstat back to English

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

I do not think they are incompatible if you separate it into three
categories: machine readable (must never be translated), for the current
user right now (current i18n), and for sharing with other humans
(i18n.projectlang).

Anything you see as a user is potentially useful to other project
participants, so I do not think there is a bright line that
delineates the latter two classes.  The output of format-patch is
obviously meant as the latter, but how about the output from show or
log?  Is it worth trying to define the bright line somewhere, only
to annoy users who may want to draw the line differently?

Whether the maintenance of that three-way split is worthwhile, I don't
know (and that is why I said "in an ideal world..." in my original
mail, and left the implementation for people who care more). In the
meantime, before we have a working i18n.projectlang solution, which slot
should we put those messages in?

I'd argue for putting them in the machine-readable category, because it
is less likely to cause interoperability annoyances (and since git is
not fully translated anyway, we kind of assume at this point that people
know some basic phrases in the C locale).

And of course it is not fool-proof. The "for the current user right now"
messages may bleed into conversation with other people. But that cannot
be helped if we are to do any localization at all, and it does not seem
to be a big problem in practice. The only practical problem so far is
with certain meant-to-be-shared messages.

-Peff

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 02:26:55PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I do not think they are incompatible if you separate it into three
categories: machine readable (must never be translated), for the current
user right now (current i18n), and for sharing with other humans
(i18n.projectlang).

Anything you see as a user is potentially useful to other project
participants, so I do not think there is a bright line that
delineates the latter two classes.  The output of format-patch is
obviously meant as the latter, but how about the output from show or
log?  Is it worth trying to define the bright line somewhere, only
to annoy users who may want to draw the line differently?

I agree that the line is not bright. I do not know if it is worthwhile
or not. I think it will solve some practical problems, but it may also
introduce others.  But basically having a per-repo LANG setting (which
is what the projectlang you are talking about would do) also does not
seem like a solution that people will use, because they will not get any
localization benefit at all.

So again, I'd rather err on the side of pushing those things that are
near the line into the "do not translate" side, letting people use LANG
to localize the rest, and accepting that occasionally people are going
to accidentally show you output in a language you don't understand. But
hopefully that keeps it to "occasionally" and not "every time you send
out a patch".

-Peff