On Sat, Jan 24, 2026 at 11:02 AM Benno Schulenberg
<[email protected]> wrote:

> > Can you please try replacing your polib with this one?
>
> Sorry, no.  A usable script should work on a distro that is five years old.
> (I'm on Linux Mint 21.3.)

Benno,

As you surely know, I'm not the one who caused the current (and indeed
pretty unfortunate and frustrating) situation.

Yet, I volunteered to create a script that significantly reduces the
amount of work needed by translators.  If it was my task to update my
native tongue's translations, I would probably draw the line here:
apply this script and do the rest manually.  In my opinion it's
probably easier and faster (no matter how monotone and boring) than to
further improve the script.  YMMV, and if you're still not satisfied
with the remaining amount of work, that's fine, I accept that.

But in the mean time refusing to (temporarily) update a single file on
your computer, and instead expecting that I should have taken the
extra miles to make my script portable to much older systems, and I
guess to a wide variety of Linux distros and other Unix systems too,
just sounds way out of touch to me.  It's obviously a quick one-off
script, to be used exactly once by several translators, that's it.  It
was clearly not meant to be a production quality software.  (I have
also offered to send you the output of that script, which you wasn't
interested in.)

If you seriously think that I should have fired up dozens of VMs,
installed a variety of OSes across a time span of many-many years,
tested the script in each of them and adjusted to make it work, just
in order to save you from the trouble of installing 1 file, then I
don't think you're in the position of criticizing coreutils developers
about the amount of translation work they caused you.

While I certainly agree with you that coreutils developers should have
handled this massive string change much better (both technically and
process-wise), I'm sorry to say but I personally found your attitude
in handling this situation much worse than that, utterly lacking any
positivity and cooperation attempt towards finding a solution.


Pádraig,

I think the situation is quite bad. I'm not happy with the idea of
shipping 9.10 with a bunch of lost translations, and catching up in
9.11 or so. Distros won't care, they'll ship 9.10, and users will be
unhappy.

Could the release be delayed until a solution is found? Come up with a
script that restores most of the translations, so that the remaining
amount of manual work is reasonable? And then give it some time for
translators to catch up.

If there's something urgent you want to release in 9.10, then maybe
revert the hyperlink stuff for the time being, and re-apply it right
after 9.10 (thus giving translators an entire cycle)?


On another note, I'm not in touch with the translators and don't know
how to reach them, so if there's any chance of my script being useful
to some of them, could you (or anyone here) please forward it to them?


But anyway, I'm just a random bystander here who doesn't want to get
involved too much, so just do whatever you feel appropriate.


Thx,
e.

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