Hi all,
I was fixing a "can't modify frozen String" crash in YaST registration when
processing a translated string. After debugging and trying to write an unit
test for
it I found an interesting difference: it depends whether the translation for the
message is available or not.
Translation Available
---------------------
> rpm -q yast2-trans-cs
yast2-trans-cs-84.87.20180514.157a0650d-lp150.1.1.noarch
> LC_ALL=cs_CZ.UTF-8 ruby -ryast -e 'include Yast::I18n; textdomain "base"; puts
_("&Yes"); puts _("&Yes").frozen?'
&Ano
true
So the result is a *frozen* translated string. The code would crash in this
case.
Translation Not Available
-------------------------
> rpm -q yast2-trans-es
package yast2-trans-es is not installed
> LC_ALL=es_ES.UTF-8 ruby -ryast -e 'include Yast::I18n; textdomain "base"; puts
_("&Yes"); puts _("&Yes").frozen?'
&Yes
false
In this case you'll get the original untranslated and *not frozen* string. In
this
case it would NOT crash. :-S
The Problem
-----------
The problem is that when running the unit tests in Travis, Jenkins or in OBS no
translation is installed and the tests run in the English locale. However, on
user
systems or during installation the translations are usually available. That
means
it's hard to test it in the same environment, the unit tests might not find this
problem in the code.
Moreover the translations for new texts might be available later, so it could
work
fine but crash later after updating the translation package without changing
the YaST
module. That's a debugging nightmare...
Proposed Solution
-----------------
The ruby-bindings code contains this line [1]:
found ? Translation._(str) : str
The fast_gettext gem returns nil when the translation is not available. In that
case
we return the original text.
My proposed solution is to also freeze the not translated message to have
consistent
output:
found ? Translation._(str) : str.freeze
The Disadvantage
----------------
The disadvantage is that as a side effect of this change the passed parameter
will be
modified (becomes frozen), like this:
a = "text"
a.frozen? # => false
puts _(a)
a.frozen? # => true
Usually that should not make any troubles as we either use string literals
_("foo") or we use constants which should be preferably frozen anyway:
TEXT = N_("foo")
...
_(TEXT)
(Or at least I'm not aware of any place where it would make troubles.)
Of course, we could duplicate the string to not modify the original one:
found ? Translation._(str) : str.dup.freeze
but I'm afraid this would have memory and performance impact as all not
translated
strings would be duplicated.
So I'd prefer the first solution and if you need to avoid freezing the original
string you can make the copy yourselves, e.g.:
puts _(a.dup)
a.frozen? # => false
(Or course this behavior and the solution needs to be well documented.)
Any comments or ideas to this topic?
Thank you!
[1]
https://github.com/yast/yast-ruby-bindings/blob/4652448963160abc234d1199f06bf10f08989cf5/src/ruby/yast/i18n.rb#L63
--
Ladislav Slezák
YaST Developer
SUSE LINUX, s.r.o.
Corso IIa
Křižíkova 148/34
18600 Praha 8
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