Re: [PATCH] Revert diffstat back to English

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 13, 2012, 21:26 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr4q562cg.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120913212043.GB16968@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> I do not think they are incompatible if you separate it into three
> categories: machine readable (must never be translated), for the current
> user right now (current i18n), and for sharing with other humans
> (i18n.projectlang).

Anything you see as a user is potentially useful to other project participants, so I do not think there is a bright line that delineates the latter two classes. The output of format-patch is obviously meant as the latter, but how about the output from show or log? Is it worth trying to define the bright line somewhere, only to annoy users who may want to draw the line differently?

Show 18 quoted lines

> Whether the maintenance of that three-way split is worthwhile, I don't
> know (and that is why I said "in an ideal world..." in my original
> mail, and left the implementation for people who care more). In the
> meantime, before we have a working i18n.projectlang solution, which slot
> should we put those messages in?
>
> I'd argue for putting them in the machine-readable category, because it
> is less likely to cause interoperability annoyances (and since git is
> not fully translated anyway, we kind of assume at this point that people
> know some basic phrases in the C locale).
>
> And of course it is not fool-proof. The "for the current user right now"
> messages may bleed into conversation with other people. But that cannot
> be helped if we are to do any localization at all, and it does not seem
> to be a big problem in practice. The only practical problem so far is
> with certain meant-to-be-shared messages.
>
> -Peff