[Nano-devel] RFC: some strings with problems

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hi all,

When nano asks a question, it sometimes puts the question mark
directly after the last word, sometimes there is an extra space
before it.  See here:

msgid "File %s is being edited (by %s with %s, PID %d); continue?"
msgid "Failed to write backup file, continue saving? (Say N if unsure) "
msgid "Replace this instance?"
msgid "Save modified buffer before linting?"
msgid "This message is for unopened file %s, open it in a new buffer?"

msgid "File exists, OVERWRITE ? "
msgid "Save modified buffer anyway ? "
msgid "Save file under DIFFERENT NAME ? "
msgid "File was modified since you opened it, continue saving ? "
msgid "Save modified buffer (ANSWERING \"No\" WILL DESTROY CHANGES) ? "

The messages with capitals in them were inherited from Pico.
But I propose to remove the space before the question mark,
and to use a semicolon instead of a comma where appropriate.
See the first attached patch.

Oh, the warning from Pico when the file already exists
is nicer, by the way:  «File "XXX" exists, OVERWRITE ?»
Nano should do that too, I think.


Looking through the Croatian PO file, I noticed that one of
the messages that is put up on the statusbar is too long --
81 characters, when on an 80-column terminal only 76 positions
are available for the message (the other 4 being taken up by
the brackets and spaces: "[  ]").

To see if there are more strings that are too long, I did this:

msgmerge --no-wrap /dev/null po/nano.pot >blank.pot

grep "^msgid " blank.pot | sed 's/msgid "//' | sed 's/"$//' |
    while read line; do echo "$(echo $line | wc -c)  $line"; done |
    grep -v "^. " | sort | less

Luckily, it is the only line that is too long (the corresponding
plural message will be even one character longer):

81  Read %lu line (Converted from DOS and Mac format - Warning: No write 
permission)

The second patch shortens this string.

Comments?

Benno

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normalize-question-mark.patch
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shorter-long-message.patch
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