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

[Alex Henrie]

2015-12-06 11:53 GMT-07:00 Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>:
> 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outdated English strings in the Hebrew file when Wine automatically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