Re: gnome-vfs ngettext reversal (string freeze break?)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 15:13, Christian Rose wrote:
> ons 2003-08-13 klockan 14.41 skrev Alexander Larsson:
> > We recently added usage of ngettext to gnome-vfs, but now we recognize
> > that this was a bit premature, since ngettext support is not as widely
> > supported yet (see bug 116236).
> 
> That bug report is as I see it mostly about making the use of ngettext()
> easier. There's not much to do about compatibility -- we can't wait
> indefinately for each and every platform to support ngettext(), because
> that simply isn't ever going to happen. The most widely used platforms,
> the ones where development actually moves forward in this area, have
> already supported it for quite some time, and we already use it in the
> desktop (gnome-games and gnopernicus comes to mind).
> 
> 
> > However, reverting this change probably results in some sort of string
> > freeze break, since a plural translation becomes a normal translation.
> > Is this ok?
> 
> I see no need for reverting the use of ngettext in gnome-vfs, at least
> not without specific examples of why it would be an absolute necessity.

No other part of the gnome development platform requires ngettext yet,
and ngettext is pretty recent, so a lot of platforms don't have it.
Linux with glibc before 2.2 doesn't have it for instance. Furthermore,
this change was made very very late in the cycle, and usage was only in
one small place in one module. If we decide to use ngettext we should at
least use it everywhere (there are patches in bugzilla for other
modules).

I've reverted this now. But I think when we branch for 2.5 we should
just bite the bullet and start using ngettext.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl@redhat.com    alla@lysator.liu.se 
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