bug#19503: most translations of proper names aren't being used
On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote: ... > BTW, it might have been nice to have the initial git commits > for these tools attributed to the original author. Hindsight and all that :) It would have been nice, indeed. When I agreed to do the job of maintaining the fileutils, textutils and shellutils packages, I tried hard to find a CVS repository (no dVCS existed back then), but as far as I could tell, if there had been one, it was gone. It was only reluctantly that I resorted to putting old tarballs on versioned release branches. While djm was the primary author for many tools, there were invariably commits by others, too, as seen in old/*/ChangeLog*. However, without some VCS files, it was not feasible to attribute. Even with ChangeLog+CVS, automated attribution as I did for the glibc cvs-to-git conversion was nontrivial: most commits were done by Ulrich, but ChangeLog usually gave the name of the "Author", and reliably mapping the cvs user-name or ChangeLog-attributed name to a git Real Name/email pair took some work.
bug#19503: most translations of proper names aren't being used
On 04/01/15 16:50, Jim Meyering wrote: > On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote: > ... >> Also there is the more general point about how correct >> it is to attribute a program to author(s) in any case, >> as that tracked to a much more accurate level of detail >> by git blame etc. Should we be removing output of >> author names at runtime completely? > > We cannot do that blindly, since we lack version control history > from before 1992, which would make it appear that David J. MacKenzie > (who wrote many of these tools from scratch) contributed nothing. Well we'd still leave the /* Written by ... */ comments at the start. I'm just not convinced of the need for attribution at runtime, given that it's inaccurate and awkward to represent. BTW, it might have been nice to have the initial git commits for these tools attributed to the original author. Hindsight and all that :) Also I was wondering recently about the origins of some of this code, and thought it might be useful to have a repo with commits per release, which could be obtained from various old tar balls. I did notice a few pre 1992 tarballs. I wonder what the best source of these would be. cheers, Pádraig.
bug#19503: most translations of proper names aren't being used
On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote: ... > Also there is the more general point about how correct > it is to attribute a program to author(s) in any case, > as that tracked to a much more accurate level of detail > by git blame etc. Should we be removing output of > author names at runtime completely? We cannot do that blindly, since we lack version control history from before 1992, which would make it appear that David J. MacKenzie (who wrote many of these tools from scratch) contributed nothing.
bug#19503: most translations of proper names aren't being used
Hi, Just now I noticed that 'du --version | tail -2' produces here this: Verkita de Torbjern GRANLUND (Torbjörn Granlund), David MacKenzie, Paul Eggert kaj Jim Meyering. whereas I expected it to produce this: Verkita de Torbjern GRANLUND (Torbjörn Granlund), David MEKENZI (David MacKenzie), Paŭl EGERT (Paul Eggert) kaj Ĝim MEJERING (Jim Meyering). Quite a few languages transcribe proper names to their own writing system and phonology. But coreutils, when a proper name does not contain any UTF-8 characters, defines away the propername() function, thus ignoring any transcription that translators made for this name. I think this is wrong and that propername() should always be used, or at least that disabling it should be optional. If however propername() is never going to be used, then please don't waste translator time by marking proper names as translatable/transcribable. The propername() function is defined to a noop in the system.h file with the argument that it saves 17K on each executable. But... shouldn't propername() be a library function that isn't actually included into each and every util? Benno -- http://www.fastmail.com - Same, same, but different...
