Subject: Re: [PATCH] rebase: make warning less passive aggressive

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:46:10 -0800

Jean-Noël AVILA <[email-masked]> writes:

> As a translator, I'm less bothered by editing a sentence to remove a question 
> mark (maybe enforcing a language style and reformulating the sentence by the 
> way), than by translating again and again similar sentences.

Sure, but if the original in C locale used to be "FOO BAR?" and you
translated it to "foo bar?" in your language, and then a patch
updates the string in the source to "FOO BAR", doesn't msgmerge
notice that the original as a "fuzzy" matching and offer you
something like

    # fuzzy
    msgid "FOO BAR"
    msgstr "foo bar?"

so that all you have to do is to remove '?' anyway?  So I do not
think you'd need to translate the "FOO BAR" part again and again.

But the above assumes that for your language, the ONLY thing to turn
such a rhetorical "passive aggressive" question into grammatically
correct statement of a fact is to remove the question mark.  It may
not be universally true for all languages, and for some language,
even after msgmerge did its job correctly, you may need to do more
than just removing the question mark to adjust the remaining "foo
bar" part.