Re: gnome-photos: String freeze break request (GNOME/gnome-photos!28)

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

Hey Alexandre,

On Fri, Mar 02, 2018 at 10:59:56AM +0100, Alexandre Franke wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 9:12 PM, Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se> wrote:
> > The strings and accompanying screenshots can be found in this merge
> > request:
> >   https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-photos/merge_requests/28
>
> The handling of that parenthesis with a plural form looks dubious to me.
> Are you sure that???s the correct way to do it?

The short answer is that I am now considering using three strings:
 (a) "Select items for import"
 (b) "Select items for import (%u selected)"
 (c) "Select items for import (%u selected)" - plural form of (b)

That would also avoid the need to deal with context-sensitive
ngettext.

The longer answer is that these strings originate from the title of the
generic selection mode [1] header bar. See:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-photos/blob/wip/rishi/import-string-changes-1/src/photos-main-toolbar.c#L71

That pattern was inherited from gnome-documents:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-documents/tree/src/overview.js#n587

I didn't come up with it, but I assumed that the rationale was to
avoid exposing the <b>...</b> markup to translators. However, I fear
that the composed string has been wrong for right-to-left locales. So,
maybe, the code should compose the parts differently for such locales?

Note that the "%d selected" string used for the selection mode title
is actually wrong in C. It should be "%u selected" because the length
argument is an unsigned int. We can let it slide for 3.28, but that's
the reason I wanted to use a context for the new "%u selected" string
- to avoid mixing up bits from different titles when we fix that bug
[2].

However, on second thoughts, since the new strings under discussion
don't have any markup, it's probably better to avoid any composition
and spell them out.

Cheers,
Rishi

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/selection-mode.html.en
[2] Piotr was asking about it on IRC, but I was AFK.