On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 16:37, Bollinger, John C <john.bollin...@stjude.org> wrote:
> > > > We could change Gettext to stop considering the Icon key as > translatable *without* changing the specification, but that would be a > violation of the spec > > > > Would it? The spec does not say that localestrings are translatable. It > says that they are _localizable_, in a specific technical sense that the > spec lays out. That is, different values can be provided for different > locales by use of locale postfixes, and lookup by key is expected to take > those into account in light of LC_MESSAGES when determining the value > associated with the key. > > > > That most keys with localestring values are best localized by translating > their values between human languages is a function of the significance of > specific keys, not of the data type. > I'm sympathetic to this argument. > , and the Gettext maintainers don't want to commit to that violation; > which is why Will is asking to fix the spec, in order to unblock the > catch-22 situation with Gettext developers waiting for a change to the > spec, and the spec maintainers waiting for a change in the localisation > software. > > > > I claim that the Gettext maintainers are interpreting the spec wrongly. > Evidently that misinterpretation is fairly common, hence the prevalence of > “don’t translate this” comments on Icon keys, but on the other hand, the > prevalence of such comments also conveys that it is widely understood that > Icon keys should not be localized by translation (and, it follows, maybe > not at all). > To be clear, I hadn't actually encountered resistance to making this change in (x)gettext without changing the specification – I just anticipated that one might. (I had some idea that someone had raised the idea and got this rebuttal but I can't find any reference to it.) I think it might be a neat solution to change the implementation, and just update the spec with your argument here – code that reads .desktop files should treat Icon as localizable, but translation tools may wish to ignore it. I attached a patch on https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?56543 to implement this. Projects which want the previous behaviour would be able to pass --keyword=Icon to xgettext. – Will
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