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

On Sunday, 5 December 2021 08:31:38 CET Junio C Hamano wrote:

Johannes Sixt [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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.

Yup.  I do not think we are quite ready to have two identical msgid
strings to be translated into two different msgstr strings.  We've
briefly talked about pgettext() a few months ago, but nothing
concrete came out of it, as far as I can recall.

As a translator, I made sure that all the messages are with the same grammatical structure where the placeholders are only command line options. The same messages with placeholders are meant to convey exactly the same meaning at all their use point. We have all the control on the source code to tailor them so that one message model is only used with specific types of variables (options here). That's another reason why I was proposing to define and name them.

If needed, "%s and %s are mutually exclusive" could be turned into "options %s and %s are mutually exclusive" to make it clear that the placeholders can only hold option names.