bug#26621: hint for translators is missing from POT file, but is opaque anyhow

[Paul Eggert]

On 04/24/2017 12:57 PM, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> Well, in the past week I have been writing several ISO images
> to a USB stick, and dd's progress messages first come out at
> about 1.1 second intervals, then slow down to about every four
> or five seconds, and after about a minute start to arrive again
> at close to every 1.0 seconds.

Although that's annoying, I don't offhand see an easy way to fix that (a 
single write that takes a very long time, e.g., more than a second), and 
if the timestamps are that coarse then 1 s resolution is not so bad anyway.

> (Also, when dd is done copying records, the USB stick isn't
> ready yet:

You might need to use 'eject' on the stick before unplugging it. Perhaps 
dd should have an option to eject the output when done?

> /* TRANSLATORS: The translations of the next three msgids should
> be of ascending length.  That is: each subsequent msgstr should be
> longer than the preceding one. */

That's not technically correct, as the msgstr length itself is not 
directly relevant; what matters are the numbers of bytes and columns in 
the formatted output. One could have a short msgstr that formats to a 
long output. It's the number of bytes and columns in the formatted 
output that matters, not the number of bytes and columns in the msgstr.

To some extent this translator note is pedantic, as translations are 
quite likely to have the desired property even if translators don't know 
about the issue.