Re: [PATCH] create a convenient function to align/print option help text

[Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy]

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 3:15 PM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 09/03/2012 04:58 AM, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 6:36 AM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Thanks for doing that.
>>> I really like this, but wouldn't it invalidate all the existing 
>>> translations?
>>> It seems there would be a lot of work in transitioning coreutils usage() 
>>> functions
>>> to the scheme, but even more work munging existing translations?
>>
>> Existing translations should remain (though marked fuzzy). Translators
>> just need to go through remove redundant parts.
>
> Yep it would be a fairly manual process,
> and one that would need to be done en masse,
> so that many translations weren't invalidated
> on a new release.
>
> When I changed the df headings code to
> abstract the translations in a similar way,
> I updated all translations which Benno accepted
> as a single tarball udate.  It took a couple
> of hours to do this though, so updating usage()
> for all commands could be a full day's work?

I haven't thought of that. coreutils supports 40 languages. Yeah, maybe 1 day.

>
>> The thing is translations should be updated anyway because of
>> misalignment (I only checked ja and vi). We could use this opportunity
>> to avoid potential work for translators later (e.g. a new long option
>> is added and the whole table needs to be realigned, which currently
>> changes every help string, or a misalign in original strings
>> propagated to all translations).
>
> Good point.
>
> Would you be willing to update the translations as a group,
> if I concentrated on the coreutils side?

I think I could.
-- 
Duy