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

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org> writes:

[...]

> 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 |

This is really something for usability gnome org, I think, but you are
missing some benefits from using plain numbers. It scales better
(consider '1 2 3,4,5,13,30 * *') and it gives you the important
information right away - namely the numbers. They stand out clearly so
you don't have to parse as much.

And really, if you think hard about it, I am certain you can come up
with a good solution, e.g.:

  At hours 2, 3, at minute 2, at day 4 of the month
  At hour 2, at day 15 of the month

Then you need perhaps twenty strings to cover all cases, but that's
manageable.


It's of course your decision, but most people probably won't bother
with your module if they have to hack Python to get it working (not
necessarily me, I happen like Python). And it also sounds like a
maintenance nightmare. Consider having to fix 60 different
implementations when you need to change something.

It does require you to have the guts to throw out your nice cron
translator, though. :-)

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/