On 27/10/2020 02:19, Paul Eggert wrote:
One way to attack the problem is (1) use only one-liners for option help, and (2) not worry about indentation so much (either in English or in German) as the excess indenting doesn't help readability enough to justify the translation hassle. To do that, I propose changes like the attached for comm. This will cause 'comm --help' output to look like the following, which is good enough and which will still work with help2man:Usage: comm [OPTION]... FILE1 FILE2 Compare sorted files FILE1 and FILE2 line by line. When FILE1 or FILE2 (not both) is -, read standard input. With no options, produce three-column output. Column one contains lines unique to FILE1, column two contains lines unique to FILE2, and column three contains lines common to both files. -1 suppress column 1 (lines unique to FILE1) -2 suppress column 2 (lines unique to FILE2) -3 suppress column 3 (lines that appear in both files) --check-order check that the input is correctly sorted --nocheck-order do not check that the input is correctly sorted --output-delimiter=STR separate columns with STR --total output a summary -z, --zero-terminated line delimiter is NUL, not newline --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit Note, comparisons honor the rules specified by 'LC_COLLATE'. Examples: comm -12 file1 file2 Print only lines present in both file1 and file2. comm -3 file1 file2 Print lines in file1 not in file2, and vice versa.
I feel using only one liners for all utils would lose too much information. I feel less strongly about removing indentation, though do feel we would lose reability. Consider `ls --help` for example. comm --help is already quite unreadable and so less affected by such changes. Also a mass change like this could invalidate existing translations, and cause too much churn. We did discuss a long time ago that a mass change to warrant the churn would be to split each option to a separate string, i.e. a separate translation. Also that we could take advantage of the mbsalign module to more dynamically align the option description. cheers, Pádraig
