Format/style of UI message

Peter Krempa pkrempa at redhat.com
Fri Jul 17 17:44:43 UTC 2020


On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 17:01:47 +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently took a look at the UI/user visible messages from libvirt,
> which are translated using gettext. They are extracted in a single
> libvirt.pot catalog, which includes messages from libvirt.so itself
> (mostly, if not all, errors), the separate daemons, the helper tools,
> and from virsh.
> 
> I noticed there is plently of room for improvements: what strikes is
> the lack of consistency among the messages. Let me state first: I
> understand that not all the people are native English speakers
> (I am not), so I'm not picking against anyone.
> 
> Some examples:
> 
> a) different capitalization:
> - "cannot open %s"
> - "Cannot open %s"
> 
> b) different quoting for files/identifiers/etc:
> - "Cannot open %s"
> - "Cannot open '%s'"

>From a "lookup the message in the code" standpoint I've added to the
style guidelines that any formating modifier should be quoted and also
that the full error message should be on a single line.

While the second one is totaly opaque to translators and users I really
hate when I pick the wrong part of an error to grep in the code. The
quoting helps in picking what to look for.




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