Re: format-patch: why are the Range-diff: and Interdiff: headers translated?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 24, 2025, 00:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20250924004133.GA1142438@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <54b9d6a1-6edf-43e0-8e6b-e096f322df64@app.fastmail.com>

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 09:59:55PM +0200, Kristoffer Haugsbakk wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> I’m not concerned about machine-readability.  My thought was that
> localization/l10n of this software was intended for the user themselves.
> And also that users might, without intending to do so necessarily, end
> up using localized output in contexts where they do want English
> strings, like on an English-language mailing list.  Even though they
> might prefer Spanish (from my Colombian example) when using Git
> themselves.
> 
> But there might for all I know be Colombian/Latin American patch mailing
> lists where localization like this works great.
> 
> I’m not really in the natural target group for l10n Git.  I might be
> totally missing all the use-cases here.

I'm not a user of the l10n stuff either, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt. But it seems obvious to me that "the language I am most comfortable using" and "the language for the project I am contributing to" might not necessarily be the same.

I'm not sure how well gettext supports this use case, though. The first one should obviously come from LANG, etc. If we added a hypothetical format.lang config option, is there a way to tell gettext to translate a string using a language string provided per-call, rather than from the environment?

I don't know that anybody is really even asking for this, so I'm not proposing to spend a lot of effort on it. But the thread made me wonder what is even possible/easy to do here.

-Peff