Breaking up Git's color emission for i18n

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: May 2, 2012, 22:56 UTC
Message-ID: <CACBZZX7fE0CT5xV+QKPZ4BnkqdU0Lmd8LQU+45kjt+RM0meuEA@mail.gmail.com>

2012/5/2 Ralf Thielow <ralf.thielow@googlemail.com>:

Show 9 quoted lines

>  #: wt-status.c:905
>  msgid "behind "
> -msgstr "hinter "
> +msgstr "hinterher: "
>
>  #: wt-status.c:908 wt-status.c:911
>  msgid "ahead "
> -msgstr "weiter: "
> +msgstr "voraus: "

Isn't this an artifact of you rather wanting to have:

    3 hinterher, 2 voraus

But because the code imposes the word order you're going for:

    hinterher: 3, voraus: 2

Whether that's the case or not I wonder how we could handle all these lego translations in wt-status.c.

Currently we have stuff like this:

    color_fprintf(s->fp, header_color, _("ahead "));
    color_fprintf(s->fp, branch_color_local, "%d", num_ours);
    color_fprintf(s->fp, header_color, _(", behind "));
    color_fprintf(s->fp, branch_color_remote, "%d", num_theirs);

That could be something clever like this:

    color_fprintf("<color header>ahead</color> <color
local>%d</color>, <color header>behind</color> <color
local>%d/<color>", ...);

We have some code in color_parse() in color.c for parsing colors, but I haven't spotted if it can parse embedded things like that.

But I think an easier option is:

    color_fprintf(%sahead%s %s%d%s, %sbehind%s %s%d%s",
                  header_color_begin,
                  color_reset,
                  branch_color_begin,
                  num_ours,
                  color_reset,
                  ...
    );

Which we already use in e.g. branch.c:

    strbuf_addf(&out, "%c %s%-*s%s", c, branch_get_color(color),
            maxwidth, name.buf,
            branch_get_color(BRANCH_COLOR_RESET));

That would result in lots of arguments and fairly unintelligible format strings, but at least we wouldn't have to create some custom parser and the msgfmt --check option would check that we have all the formats there.

We could also expose this as an internal command to do coloring for our shellscript libraries.