On 23/04/17 08:17, Benno Schulenberg wrote: > > Commit 2dab6cd3c2e18eb574b24e54fba86a33c80b6a27 changed > the progress messages for dd, but in doing so separated > the instruction/hint for translators from the call to > ngettext(). For xgettext to pick up such comments, the > comment must end of the line directly before the call. > So the current POT file for coreutils does not contain > this comment/hint/instruction. > > Second, the comment seems to consist of two parts that > appear to be unrelated. So it would be better to split > the text into two separate paragraphs. > > Third, the second part of that comment reads like this: > > If one of > these formats A looks shorter on the screen than another format > B, then A's string length should be less than B's, and appending > strlen (B) - strlen (A) spaces to A should make it appear to be > at least as long as B. > > I don't understand what it is trying to say. Does it say > that if, of those four strings, untranslated string A is > shorter than untranslated string B, that then also the > translation of string A must be shorter than the translation > of string B? If yes, then: 1) please reword, 2) why?, and > 3) does the program blow up if not? Or is this part of the > comment not meant for translators at all? > > Fourth, the first part of the comment begins with this: > > The instances of "s" in the following formats are > the SI symbol "s" (meaning second), and should not be translated. > > Why should they not be translated? In order to avoid problems > with grammatical congruence in languages like Polish? But for > a language like Dutch I would accept the mild incongruence > when the elapsed time is exactly x.1 seconds, which will be > a rare occasion. For all other numbers it will be much clearer > to say "seconden" instead of just "s". So I would suggest to > change this part of the comment to: > > The instances of "s" in the next four strings are the SI > symbol "s" (meaning seconds). It may be preferrable > to leave them untranslated, to avoid problems with > grammatical congruence. > > Fifth (and this is the reason I arrived here), when using > status=progress, the elapsed time that is printed is shown > with four or five decimals. 1) Is the time measurement > really this accurate? 2) Sometimes the last one or two > or three decimals happen to be zero, and then they get > truncated, making the progress message a bit shorter for > one second. It would be nicer to use a fixed number of > decimals so that the message doesn't unnecessarily "jump". > > Sixth, the format string uses %g, which means that the > number of seconds will be displayed in exponential form > when the number becomes very large. Is that intentional? > Wouldn't it be better to use %f? I've played a bit with it, > and I think %.1f is best, because also the other numbers > in the progress message, when they are in decimal form, > use a single decimal of precision.
Yes the different width numbers is not great. This jumps around on my system: dd status=progress if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=2M Yes, http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=v8.24-123-g2dab6cd changed from %.6f to %g. You can get some sense of the I/O overhead by looking at the less significant decimal digits, so I find the precision useful. I'll change this back to .6f I think to avoid the jumping, and fix up the TRANSLATOR notes. cheers, Pádraig
