Re: [PATCH] PRItime: wrap PRItime for better l10n compatibility

> Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Commit cb71f8bdb5 ("PRItime: introduce a new "printf format" for
>> timestamps", 2017-04-21) does not play well with i18n framework. The
>> static string concatenation cannot be correctly interpreted by
>> gettext utilities, such as xgettext.
>>
>> Wrap PRItime in format_raw_time() function, so that we can extract
>> correct l10n messages into "po/git.pot".
>>
>> Reported-by: Jean-Noël Avila <jn.avila@free.fr>
>> Signed-off-by: Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com>
>> ...
>> @@ -191,6 +200,15 @@ struct date_mode *date_mode_from_type(enum date_mode_type type)
>>       return &mode;
>>  }
>>
>> +const char *format_raw_time(timestamp_t time)
>> +{
>> +     static struct strbuf time_buf = STRBUF_INIT;
>> +
>> +     strbuf_reset(&time_buf);
>> +     strbuf_addf(&time_buf, "%"PRItime, time);
>> +     return time_buf.buf;
>> +}
>
> Hmm.
>
> Two potential issues are:
>
>  - After this patch, there still are quite a many
>
>         printf("time is %"PRItime" ...\n", timestamp)
>
>    so the burden on the programmers having to remember when it is
>    required to use format_raw_time() becomes unclear, and makes the
>    change/churn larger when an existing message needs to be marked
>    for translation.
>
>  - The static struct strbuf here is a cheap way to avoid leaks, but
>    at the same time it is unfriendly to threaded code.  We could
>    instead do:
>
>         void append_PRItime(struct strbuf *buf, timestamp_t time);
>
>    to fix that trivially, but the damage to the caller obviously is
>    much larger going this way.
>