Re: Translation of numeric values (application gnome-schedule)

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 20:56 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:


> To be specific, in this example you could perhaps instead of this
> sentence splitting:

> _("Run the application every %s minute of every hour."), _("3rd")

> do something like:

> _("Run the application at this minute every hour: %s"), 3

> The latter is perhaps not as pretty, but it will probably work with
> translation for almost any language.

Yes, but thats a very simple example (and for that example I would agree
with the method).

The application, however, must also parse crontab records like 

1 2 3 * * ls # Untitled

to something readable.

Would would become:

At every first minute of the second hour of the third day of every
month, run ls

gnome-schedule will, at this moment, translate it to this sentence.

The languages that cannot get such translations working using the
current techniques can also take a look at the crontab.py's 'easy'
method. We can also put that block of code in the "lang.py"-file and
make it as easy as possible for translators to get this supported.

Unless we use multiple lines we cannot show it the way you propose. It
would look like this:


Untitled | At this hour: 2             | ls |
         | At this minute: 1           |    |
         | At this day of the month: 3 |    |

This is as hard as ... to understand

Untitled | 1 2 3 * * | ls |

What I mean with that is that the user still has to compute the actual
frequency using that thing we call 'his or her brains'. It's still not
something a human brain can understand in a glitch. Which is IMHO the
responsibility of a userinterface. Computers can be programmed to make
it supersupersuper simple for people. Lets use that capacity. Even if
that means putting some more efforts in our translations and
translation-related code.

The usage of such multiple lines would destroy the purpose of gnome-
schedule: To simplify the system-schedule and to make it accessible for
non-highlander but moral and sane people who will not live forever so
that they can learn every little detail in life (like the format of a
crontab-record). The average user will NOT accept such a format. Nether
do I. Whats more, I don't WANT my users to accept it. Because -it-is-
unacceptable.

If I want my whatever-scanner to run every first hour of the day, I want
the GUI to tell me that it will run this command "the first hour of the
day". And not that it will run it at minute 1 of hour 1 of every day of
every month.

If that means that the application will be 99% translation-specific and
1% other things, then thats what the application is all about :-).
Gnome-schedule is about translating a complex thing like the crontab to
normal person, a normal user. NOT a Unix freak or somebody who can
understand why the formatting of the frequency sucks. I don't want the
user to understand why it sucks, I want the formatting to be descriptive
and correct.

And for the Unix-geek, we still have the "View"->"Advanced" switch in
the menus. This switch will make the treeview look just like how a
crontab record looks (or an at record, once at is fully supported).

So for now I cannot accept the proposal as a real solution to the
problem :-(. For most applications you are absolutely right. But for
gnome-schedule it's not the desired result.

I can find more peace in maintaining lots of translation-specific code
than I am when I have to cripple the format of the frequency.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org