Re: Format/style of UI message
On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 17:01:47 +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
Hi,
I recently took a look at the UI/user visible messages from libvirt,
which are translated using gettext. They are extracted in a single
libvirt.pot catalog, which includes messages from libvirt.so itself
(mostly, if not all, errors), the separate daemons, the helper tools,
and from virsh.
I noticed there is plently of room for improvements: what strikes is
the lack of consistency among the messages. Let me state first: I
understand that not all the people are native English speakers
(I am not), so I'm not picking against anyone.
Some examples:
a) different capitalization:
- "cannot open %s"
- "Cannot open %s"
b) different quoting for files/identifiers/etc:
- "Cannot open %s"
- "Cannot open '%s'"
From a "lookup the message in the code" standpoint I've
added to the
style guidelines that any formating modifier should be quoted and also
that the full error message should be on a single line.
While the second one is totaly opaque to translators and users I really
hate when I pick the wrong part of an error to grep in the code. The
quoting helps in picking what to look for.