Re: [Gaim-i18n] Re: Translatable strftime() format strings?

[Richard L. <rl...@wi...>]

On Sat, 2006-02-11 at 23:06 +0100, Bjoern Voigt wrote:
> I see one problem with this approach. The step 2 may not be possible
> without loosing information, if the user sets an unsuitable locale
> charset.

I'm aware this is a possibility.

> 1) Set LC_CTYPE=3DUTF-8 within Gaim. The only problem here is to find t=
he
>     "UTF-8" name (LC_CTYPE value) for each system. On Linux it's "utf8"=
,
>     on Solaris and FreeBSD it's "UTF-8". I prefer this solution because
>     of it's simplicity. But where do we found the necessare UTF-8 local=
e
>     names? Ethan Blanton wrote about this problem.

If you find a semi-reliable way to do this, I'm all for it. We can
always fall back to the behavior we have now if we can't find a UTF-8
locale. However, I'm too busy to try to figure this out. Patches are
always wonderful. ;)

> 2) Usage of date/time strings which only have ASCII-value placeholders
>     (regardless of locale). This means, that we can not use names for
>     days, months etc. (%A, %B, ...) but numbers (%d, %m, ...). This
>     date/time strings for strftime() should be still marked as
>     translatable for the reasons which were explained by Ambrose Li.
...
> The attached patch changes the two problematic date/time strings
> according to solution 2. Please test this patch and write your comments.

To be perfectly blunt, I'm not going to sacrifice nice dates for English
speakers for non-English speakers in non-UTF8 locales, who *might* have
a problem, depending on how various translations are done. This is ONLY
a problem if you stick words in the translation... For example, using
your example of "Erd=C3=B6l" (... note I have no idea what this word mean=
s in
English...), if you translate "%x %X" to "%X Erd=C3=B6l %x", then you wil=
l
have problems if the user's character LC_CTYPE is "C", for example.
However, if you only translate it to "%X, %x", then you're fine.

If you or another translator is worried about this problem for speakers
of their language, they are free to translate "%B %Y" to "%m/%Y", "%x %
X" to "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p", etc. as your patch suggests.

Richard