Transifex expression check problem

[John Dennis]

On 05/07/2013 10:27 AM, Jiro Matsuzawa wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've filed this problem as 960628 [1]. It seems to be a significant
> problem. I hope it will be fixed soon.
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=960628

Careful, this is very dangerous territory. We've had very bad problems 
in the past where translators have not maintained format specifiers. The 
result is the application will throw an error, possibly fully aborting. 
What makes this nasty is this will occur for one locale which had bad 
msgstr's with bad format specifiers. This presents a QE nightmare where 
the application has to be tested in every locale to make sure just one 
bad translation does not crash the application.

To solve this problem we've written tools that analyzes every po file 
downloaded from TX to make sure substitutions done via format 
conversions are not lost or managled. I'm thrilled that TX has now 
apparently added consistency checks to prevent these problems much like 
we've been forced to do. FWIW our tools also enforce the use of named 
and/or indexed substitutions so that translators can reorder.

I absolutely do not want translators unilaterally changing format 
specifiers. Translators generally do not have enough information and 
awareness of coding practices in each programming language to override 
the intentions of the original programmer. Any mistakes have the 
potential to crash the application.

> On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 1:09 AM, Jérôme Fenal <jfenal at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Because it needs to be changed in the source document.
>> So please file a bugzilla for this to happen.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> J.
>>
>>
>> 2013/5/4 KATO Tomoyuki <tomo at dream.daynight.jp>
>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I encountered error message saying
>>>>>    "The expression '% a' is not present in the translation."
>>>>> while translating strings below[1] on transifex[2].
>>>>> So, I couldn't save translation strings.
>>>>> But, this string '% a' is not gettext expression.
>>>>> If there is a blank characters following '%',
>>>>> you should not check it, shouldn't you?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> I suppose the % sign to be used as a literal should be escaped as
>>>> '100%%'
>>>> in the Fedora Security Guide code.
>>>
>>> Hi Diego,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your advice.
>>> But, I couldn't save strings '100%%'.
>>>
>>> Regards.
>>>
>>> -- tomo
>>> --
>>> trans mailing list
>>> trans at lists.fedoraproject.org
>>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/trans
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jérôme Fenal
>>
>> --
>> trans mailing list
>> trans at lists.fedoraproject.org
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/trans
>
>
>


-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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