[Translation-i18n] gettext bug? Tested with gettext 0.18.1

[Clytie S. <cl...@ri...>]

G'day again :)

I managed to update my gettext to 0.18.1 (MacPorts latest). I manually inserted errors of this type:

> #: dpkg-deb/extract.c:128
> #, c-format
> msgid "failed to read archive `%.255s'"
> msgstr "lỗi đọc kho lưu « %.250s »"


in one of my saved-while-editing dpkg files¹. As mentioned in my original email, I found quite a few (20+?) discrepancies of this kind when I was editing dpkg, and had to fix them manually because gettext did not detect them. In these errors, the placeholders %.255s and %.250s (or vice versa) appear in the original and translated string, but are not detected as being different.

Prior to re-editing this file, I checked it with msgfmt from gettext 0.8.1, and it had several errors remaining:

> $ msgfmt -cv -o /dev/null dpkg-test.po 
> dpkg-test.po:874: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
> dpkg-test.po:1904: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
> dpkg-test.po:2197: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both begin with '\n'
> dpkg-test.po:3741: number of format specifications in 'msgid' and 'msgstr' does not match
> dpkg-test.po:4018: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
> dpkg-test.po:4073: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
> dpkg-test.po:4177: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
> dpkg-test.po:5099: format specifications in 'msgid' and 'msgstr' for argument 1 are not the same
> dpkg-test.po:5285: format specifications in 'msgid_plural' and 'msgstr[0]' for argument 1 are not the same
> msgfmt: found 9 fatal errors
> 985 translated messages.

None of the format spec. errors involved the difference between %.255s and %.250s. I fixed all the above errors, so the check ran cleanly.

Then I manually re-inserted several errors of this type:

> #: dpkg-deb/extract.c:128
> #, c-format
> msgid "failed to read archive `%.255s'"
> msgstr "lỗi đọc kho lưu « %.250s »"


I checked it again with msgfmt from gettext 0.8.1:

> $ msgfmt -cv -o /dev/null dpkg-test.po 
> 985 translated messages.

:(

from Clytie 

Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team

1. Please do not use this as the current Vietnamese translation, as it is probably not the final version I sent to Debian on 2010-09-29.