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Re: Emacs i18n


From: Clément Pit-Claudel
Subject: Re: Emacs i18n
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 16:33:21 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.5.1

On 2019-03-03 20:46, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>> On Mar 4, 2019, at 5:57, Juri Linkov <address@hidden 
>> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>> My intention was to fix the bug which manifests itself in
>> grammatically incorrect sentences displayed by ‘message’ like
>>
>>  Deleted 1 matching lines
>>  1 matches found
>>  ...
> 
> The best way to do that (I fixed the almost 100% of the package.el code with 
> that) is to not use such syntax but rather things like:
> 
> Number of matches found: %d

I'm a bit late to the party, but I hope it's still OK to respond :)  This is a 
valid way to work around the issue, but I'm not sure how much I like it (I just 
noticed the change after pulling the latest Emacs from git).

The current package.el doesn't say 'Number of packages that are not available: 
%d'; instead, it says 'Packages that are not available: %d' (it used to say "%s 
packages are not available").  Other examples are 'Packages to hide: %d' 
(originally 'Hiding %s packages') and 'Packages that can be upgraded: %d; type 
`%s' to mark for upgrading.' (originally '%d package%s can be upgraded; type 
`%s' to mark %s for upgrading.').

I find this suboptimal for three reasons: First, after 'packages that are not 
available', I expect to see a list of packages, not a number.  Second, the new 
way the message is phrased puts the important bit in a less obvious place (in 
the middle of the message, rather than at the beginning: "Packages that can be 
upgraded: 5; type `U' to mark for upgrading"). Third (but this is a bit more 
fuzzy), the way the message is now written makes errors sound like normal 
events ('Packages that are not available: 3' read like the response to the 
query 'how many packages are not available?').

I understand that there's hope to support plurals and internationalization in a 
more principled way soon, but is this workaround 
(61f73703c74756e6963cc622f03bcc6938ab71b2) needed in the meantime?

Clément.




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