Re: Bikeshed invitation for nl_langinfo ambiguities

["A. Wilcox" <awilfox@adelielinux.org>]

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On 10/11/17 20:06, Rich Felker wrote:
> I've found 2 ambiguous-string-to-translate bugs in musl's locale 
> support in nl_langinfo: The pairs ABMON_5 and MON_5 ("May"), and
> T_FMT and ERA_T_FMT ("%H:%M:%S"), have the same values in the C
> locale, and thus can't be translated to distinct values like they
> need to be in other locales.
> 
> Any opinions on the cleanest way to handle this? There are various 
> hacks I could do at the implementation level, like adding a prefix 
> character to one or the other then applying +1 to the output
> string, But whatever solution we choose becomes a public interface
> for translators, so it should be something that's not horribly
> ugly.

I would personally recommend actually using the enum values as the
strings to translate.  _("MON_5"), _("ABMON_5"), etc; this is
non-ambiguous, easily understandable and describable for translators,
and does not require weird hacks at the implementation or ABI level.

Of course, then a "C" / "POSIX" strings file must be present.  But
this is, in my opinion, a very small sacrifice to ensure full purity
and ease of translation.

A simple " " with a note it is intentional /could/ work, but then
every locale file has to have an extra " " for those two values.  This
would additionally affect any additional duplicate strings that are
found when musl is translated to other languages.  If there's just ten
of these, and musl is ported to just 100 languages (glibc has over
200), that's already 10 kB wasted on a silly hack.  It is also more
brittle.

> So.... it's bikeshed time.
> 
> Rich
> 

Yellow, definitely pastel yellow.  It's a nice muted colour that is
warm and inviting without being too striking or in-your-face.  The
perfect colour for any bikeshed!

Best,
- --arw

- -- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org
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