On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, Jaka Kranjc wrote: [...]
So if I understand correctly, parts of this composite get choped and concatenated and then printed as a sequence. Lacking full sentences, semicolons *are* a good choice for Slovenian in this case too. Commas would be fitting for proper "etc" lists.
This brings up another can of worms though; capitalisation. We don't use title case at all, so these translation have the wrong case. Well, except for the first one being printed, but that is runtime knowledge, so we can't really fix it well. Gettext has no provisions for this (or gender or ...), so all that comes to mind is autocapitalisation depending on the locale, but that is probably ugly and I doubt it would work with more exotic scripts (but not sure if any would need it).
I don't think we really care about capitalization in this specific case (or that it can be handled right anyway).
So would the attached patch work?
[...]
Re usage strings: is there no 80 column limit imposed? I saw even some original strings were longer.
If no line feed is hardcoded then the line will wrap at the 80th column. The line feeds are only there to ensure words are not cut in the middle. I suspect the authors of the command line tools did not care about that. Or they did not want to hardcode line wrapping at 80 columns when the terminal may be wider or narrower. And that issue was probably overlooked in a number of cases too. So these are probably all contributing factors to the current situation.