Completed (initially) in r1826352. Help strings are split into
paragraphs (at their existing blank lines in fact) across most but not
all 'svn*' command-line tools.
Tracked as issue SVN-4724 "Split long help strings into paragraphs to
ease translation" https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4724
Now let's see what follow-up we need.
Can you try it and see if it seems to be working, Mattias?
- Julian
Mattias Engdegård wrote:
Julian Foad wrote:
One issue occurs to me. If we make this change, splitting all the long strings
into paragraphs, won't that cause one enormous headache to the translators
because they will then have a bunch of paragraph-length strings that the
translation tools think are untranslated individually, even though translations
of them existed as substrings of a previous long string?
Probably, but it's a one-time cost. The old translations will still be in the
file as obsolete strings, for reference. And chances are that those strings are
currently fuzzy anyway, if the translations haven't been updated for some time.
How could we ease that transition? It looks like it could be quite easy to
write a script that updates the .po files, if we choose our new breaks to be at
a deterministic points (e.g. every empty line), and if the current translations
keep the same structure (1:1 paragraphs) as the English version. Would that
work with most translators' work flows?
Maybe, but it sounds brittle and error-prone, and we may not necessarily want to break at
every empty line (the "merge" help, for example, contains lots of ASCII art
that may or may not belong with a paragraph of prose). Since we don't know what parts are
up to date, we would have to be pessimists and mark them all as fuzzy.
