Re: [PATCH 00/10] Factorization of messages with similar meaning

Am 03.12.21 um 22:55 schrieb Jeff King:

On Fri, Dec 03, 2021 at 07:01:39AM +0000, Jean-Noël Avila via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

This series is a meager attempt at rationalizing a small fraction of the
internationalized messages. Sorry in advance for the dull task of reviewing
these insipide patches.

Doing so has some positive effects:

 * non-translatable constant strings are kept out of the way for translators
 * messages with identical meaning are built identically
 * the total number of messages to translate is decreased.

I'm inclined to even go a step further and turn these messages into #define
or const strings. This would have the added benefits:

 * make sure that the messages to translate are identical
 * create a library of message skeletons to be picked up when new messages
   are needed

What do you think?

One slight negative of this approach is that it makes messages a bit
harder to grep for. It sometimes really nice to "git jump grep" for
specific messages you got to see where they're coming from.

This can be mitigated by using, for example,

  git grep -e --stdin --and -e mutually

as long as the rewrite keeps the arguments on the same line with the
format strings, which it does.

Another aspect is that translators lose context. For example, "%s and %s
are mutally exclusive" may have to be translated differently depending
on what kind of text is substituted for %s. In this example it's
probably always command line options (I haven't checked), so not an
immediate problem. But something to keep in mind.

-- Hannes