On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 11:25:38PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> Package: po-debconf
> Version: 0.9.0
> Severity: wishlist
>
> Hi,
>
> It's rather common in d-i for us to want to do things like this:
>
> _Choices: no ethernet card, ${CHOICES}, none of the above
> __Choices: Retry network autoconfiguration, Retry network autoconfiguration
> with a DHCP hostname, Configure network manually, ${wifireconf}, Do not
> configure the network at this time
> __Choices: /dos, /windows, Enter manually, Do not mount it
>
> The first is particularly nasty, since translators have to know to
> accurately transcribe the ${...} substitution, and in practice people
> often get this wrong in ways that are hard to test and the situation has
> to be corrected by clever searching tools.
>
> The second is not so bad (as one might expect from __Choices), but it
> still results in msgids that must be translated to the exact same msgstr
> (the ${...} substitution in one case, and the literal directory names in
> the other), so we have essentially the same resulting problems and it's
> still hard to test that the code will behave correctly no matter what
> the selected language is. I've seen various hacks around this, such as
> substituting the translated description of a separate text template into
> the choices list, and I've seen a number of resulting bugs from code
> that fails to translate back from the localised text into C that are
> extremely hard to track down.
>
> I think we could avoid a number of these problems, and get rid of some
> unnecessary load on translators, if there were a mechanism in po-debconf
> to declare that only some of the entries in a Choices list are to be
> translated. I appreciate that coming up with a reasonable syntax for
> declaring this might be tricky!
Hi Colin,
New versions of po-debconf/intltool-debian have been uploaded into experimental
to achieve this goal. Your first example isn't implemented, because the
logical solution is to use __Choices instead.
In short, here is the syntax:
* Mark the 3rd and 4th strings as translatable
#flag:translate:3,4
__Choices: /dos, /windows, Enter manually, Do not mount it
* Translate everything but the 4th string
#flag:translate!:4
__Choices: Retry network autoconfiguration, Retry network autoconfiguration
with a DHCP hostname, Configure network manually, ${wifireconf}, Do not
configure the network at this time
Full documentation is in po-debconf(7).
I will also consider adding an = operator to specify strings instead of
numbers, as in
#flag:translate=Enter manually, Do not mount it
#flag:translate!=${wifireconf}
but only if it is not too tricky.
Some internal routines have been modified, so I will add unit tests to make sure
that nothing is broken, and then upload po-debconf 1.0 to unstable.
If you have time, please test these packages and let me know if you have
comments. Thanks.
Denis
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