Re: Has anyone looked at Gettext support for Git itself?

From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: May 17, 2010, 15:12 UTC
Message-ID: <201005171712.22763.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTil0iESsCpHm-X3iiMZC3sEzCqYvXjsZiIHvFz3n@mail.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 14:32, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> wrote:
> > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> >>
> >> just prefix the calls to git with LC_ALL=C.
> >
> > And how exactly do you expect us to go back in history and prefix all
> > invocations of git in all scripts with LC_ALL=C?
> 
> I don't expect you to. I just don't think it's unreasonable that if
> Git were to be internationalized that it behave like every other *nix
> program. If you have a Chinese locale and rely on the output of some
> program being in English your scripts will break if the OS
> subsequently upgrades to a new version of the program that has been
> translated to Chinese.

I've bumped against these hysterical raisins in the past too, so you have my sympathy. But git's API is the set of its plumbing commands, I/O, arguments and all.

We do not give a similar promise for porcelain commands, which includes most of the frequently used commands that also have a bunch of translatable output like status, clone, fetch, branch, etc. You could start by translating the helpful comments in status, commit and rebase -i.

However, I'm just trying to point out that your suggested solution

> The right way to handle that is to call programs like that with
> LC_ALL=C.

will never fly, and that git will, e.g., never be able to consistently call a commit a "Version" [de] because for-each-ref must forever fill the %(type) field with "commit".

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch