Re: [PATCH] cmd: Consistently wrap lines to 75 characters.

[Francois Gouget]

On Fri, 3 Jul 2015, Alex Henrie wrote:
> 75 characters is the maximum length of a line before gettext breaks it,
> so this convention will cause each translatable string to fit snugly
> into the po files. It's also about what we were doing anyway, just not
> consistently.

I think this patch and particularly its justification does not make any 
sense.

The command line tool messages were wrapped to the typical width of a 
terminal: 80 characters. So with this change the messages now take more 
lines and lose in readability for the user.

So now we gettext does not wrap the messages as much in the PO files. 
But that's totally irrelevant and invisible to the users. It's also 
totally irrelevant and invisible to a translator as soon as he uses a 
tool like poedit or a web GUI like Pootle.

So what we have here is a change made solely to make things look a bit 
nicer to the few developers who look at PO files, at the cost of making 
them slightly worse for our users. Not a good tradeoff in my book and 
never a good justification for a patch.
> I removed Hebrew "translations" of cmd.rc that were just copies of 
> the English strings,

There was a reason for these. Has anything changed?

[PATCH] cmd: Consistently wrap lines to 75 characters.

[Alex Henrie]

2015-12-06 11:53 GMT-07:00 Francois Gouget :
> On Fri, 3 Jul 2015, Alex Henrie wrote:
> > 75 characters is the maximum length of a line before gettext breaks it,
> > so this convention will cause each translatable string to fit snugly
> > into the po files. It's also about what we were doing anyway, just not
> > consistently.
>
> I think this patch and particularly its justification does not make any
> sense.
>
> The command line tool messages were wrapped to the typical width of a
> terminal: 80 characters. So with this change the messages now take more
> lines and lose in readability for the user.

Very few translations were actually wrapping at 80 characters. They
either wrapped before 80 characters or after, but it was not at all
consistent. Most of the line breaks that this patch added were because
of lines that were longer than 80 characters anyway.

By the way, wrapping at 80 characters instead of at 75 would save all
of four lines in cmd.rc and one line in start.rc. You are welcome to
submit a patch to make that change.
> So now we gettext does not wrap the messages as much in the PO files.
> But that's totally irrelevant and invisible to the users. It's also
> totally irrelevant and invisible to a translator as soon as he uses a
> tool like poedit or a web GUI like Pootle.
>
> So what we have here is a change made solely to make things look a bit
> nicer to the few developers who look at PO files, at the cost of making
> them slightly worse for our users. Not a good tradeoff in my book and
> never a good justification for a patch.
> > I removed Hebrew "translations" of cmd.rc that were just copies of
> > the English strings,
>
> There was a reason for these. Has anything changed?

What was the reason? It looked like he.po was created by copying en.po
and making some edits. There was no reason to continue including
outdated English strings in the Hebrew file when Wine automatically
falls back to the current English string if there is no Hebrew string.
In the rare cases where the string needs to remain untranslated (e.g.
"Program Files"), a comment should be added to the translation file
(see ca.po for an example).

-Alex

[PATCH] cmd: Consistently wrap lines to 75 characters.

[Francois Gouget]

On Mon, 7 Dec 2015, Alex Henrie wrote:
[...]
> Very few translations were actually wrapping at 80 characters. They
> either wrapped before 80 characters or after, but it was not at all
> consistent. Most of the line breaks that this patch added were because
> of lines that were longer than 80 characters anyway.

I don't remember noticing wrapping problems when I looked at the command 
line tools back in the day. So if you did it so things look nicer on 
the command line that's ok but that's not the reason what was given in 
the commit.

[...]
> > > I removed Hebrew "translations" of cmd.rc that were just copies of
> > > the English strings,
> >
> > There was a reason for these. Has anything changed?
>
> What was the reason?

See the discussion below with this email stating the Hebrew 
translator's decision as far as command-line tools are concerned:
https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2011-August/091771.html

If you could please fix the Hebrew translation...

[PATCH] cmd: Consistently wrap lines to 75 characters.

[Alex Henrie]

2015-12-07 4:56 GMT-07:00 Francois Gouget :
> > > > I removed Hebrew "translations" of cmd.rc that were just copies of
> > > > the English strings,
> > >
> > > There was a reason for these. Has anything changed?
> >
> > What was the reason?
>
> See the discussion below with this email stating the Hebrew
> translator's decision as far as command-line tools are concerned:
> https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2011-August/091771.html

Thanks for the link, it was very enlightening. I think the real
question is: Are we going to support complex scripts in wineconsole
(Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai), even though Windows does not? If the
answer is "yes" then removing the copied English from he.po was the
right thing to do, to make room for real translations in the future.
If the answer is "no" then we should delete the existing Arabic
command translations and replace them with English too.

-Alex

[PATCH] cmd: Consistently wrap lines to 75 characters.

[Francois Gouget]

On Mon, 7 Dec 2015, Alex Henrie wrote:
> 2015-12-07 4:56 GMT-07:00 Francois Gouget :
> > > > > I removed Hebrew "translations" of cmd.rc that were just copies of
> > > > > the English strings,
> > > >
> > > > There was a reason for these. Has anything changed?
> > >
> > > What was the reason?
> >
> > See the discussion below with this email stating the Hebrew
> > translator's decision as far as command-line tools are concerned:
> > https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2011-August/091771.html
>
> Thanks for the link, it was very enlightening. I think the real
> question is: Are we going to support complex scripts in wineconsole
> (Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai), even though Windows does not?

Bug 28193 was las tconfirmed in June and while it's totally possible 
someone added RTL support to wineconsole without me noticing since then 
it seems unlikely. Similarly the situation of the various Unix terminal 
emulators probably did not change. So I suspect the answer is not any 
time soon, and most likely not in 1.8.
> If the answer is "yes" then removing the copied English from he.po was 
> the right thing to do, to make room for real translations in the 
> future. If the answer is "no" then we should delete the existing 
> Arabic command translations and replace them with English too.

Removing the corresponding Arabic translation would probably make sense 
and at least be consistent but it would be more correct to discuss it 
with the translator first...

[PATCH] cmd: Consistently wrap lines to 75 characters.

[Alex Henrie]

2015-12-08 4:30 GMT-07:00 Francois Gouget :
> On Mon, 7 Dec 2015, Alex Henrie wrote:
> > 2015-12-07 4:56 GMT-07:00 Francois Gouget :
> > > > > > I removed Hebrew "translations" of cmd.rc that were just copies of
> > > > > > the English strings,
> > > > >
> > > > > There was a reason for these. Has anything changed?
> > > >
> > > > What was the reason?
> > >
> > > See the discussion below with this email stating the Hebrew
> > > translator's decision as far as command-line tools are concerned:
> > > https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2011-August/091771.html
> >
> > Thanks for the link, it was very enlightening. I think the real
> > question is: Are we going to support complex scripts in wineconsole
> > (Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai), even though Windows does not?
>
> Bug 28193 was las tconfirmed in June and while it's totally possible
> someone added RTL support to wineconsole without me noticing since then
> it seems unlikely. Similarly the situation of the various Unix terminal
> emulators probably did not change. So I suspect the answer is not any
> time soon, and most likely not in 1.8.

I emailed Microsoft about complex scripts in the Command Prompt, and
received the following reply from Yosef Durr: "We are tracking this
issue and I don’t have an update at this time." I assume that this
means Microsoft considers lack of complex script support to be a bug
and they plan to fix it in a future version of Windows. So, there is
no reason for us not to fully support these languages in Wine. We
might even get it working before Microsoft does ;-)
> > If the answer is "yes" then removing the copied English from he.po was
> > the right thing to do, to make room for real translations in the
> > future. If the answer is "no" then we should delete the existing
> > Arabic command translations and replace them with English too.
>
> Removing the corresponding Arabic translation would probably make sense
> and at least be consistent but it would be more correct to discuss it
> with the translator first...

I am CC'ing Mosaab Alzoubi, the Arabic translation's author.

-Alex