Product: Fedora https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=960628
John Dennis jdennis@redhat.com changed:
What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |jdennis@redhat.com
--- Comment #1 from John Dennis jdennis@redhat.com --- 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.