Re: What's cooking in git.git (Feb 2011, #06; Sun, 27)

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 2, 2011, 10:32 UTC
Message-ID: <m3k4gh7r0m.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=+iBR3OBZ=4fi_g=JMQKi=47F47hRsWxK=RbMv@mail.gmail.com>

Piotr Krukowiecki <piotr.krukowiecki@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 6:24 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>>>   - Nit: you nicely use "%d commit%s" to handle the single/plural case
>>>     in the warning message, but then you "them" later on. It needs
>>>     (1 < lost) ? "them" : "it".
>>
>> I actually don't like playing games like that, especially when i18n topic
>> is in flight.  Among the languages I know rules reasonably well, two has
>> the rule that a countable noun is spelled differently depending on the
>> number of that thing is one or more, and one spells the noun the same way
>> regardless of the number.  Who knows if git needs to be translated into a
>> language whose noun changes its shape three-way, depending on the number
>> being one, two, or more?

Well, one of such languages with spelling depending in number of
things is Russian, for which we have translation for git-gui, so
I guess somebody would add one for git itself.

> For gettex this is described at
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Plural-forms

Which includes example for Polish language:

    1 file       =  1 plik
    2,3,4 files  =  2,3,4 pliki
    5-21 files   =  5-21  plików
    22-24 files  =  22-24 pliki
    25-31 files  =  25-31 plików
    and so on

  [...]  
  
  Three forms, special case for one and some numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4
     The header entry would look like this:

          Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \
              plural=n==1 ? 0 : \
                     n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2;

     Languages with this property include:

     Slavic family
          Polish

> Don't know how it's handled in shell scripts or perl or whatever other
> language (which does not use gettext?)

Both shell scripts and Perl scripts would use gettext: gettext.sh for shell, Locale::Messages for Perl (we need lower level than Text::Domain, and Locale::Maketext is first no longer recommended, and second does not use gettext at least by default).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git