On 15/07/2008, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Lately I've seen a lot of diffs to .i18n files
that look like this:
- (50 lines with one number of spaces in them)
+ (51 lines with a different number of spaces in them, and one of the
lines is new)
I've been long doing review using whitespace insensitive diffs. The
commit emails are just unsuitable for doing i18n review, and they are
always truncated anyways.
I think it would greatly simplify change tracking if we used more
consistent spacing in the localization files, eg changing this:
+ 'Search' => array( 'Sichen' ),
+ 'Resetpass' => array( 'Passwuert zrécksetzen'
),
to this:
+ 'Search' => array( 'Sichen' ),
+ 'Resetpass' => array( 'Passwuert zrécksetzen' ),
That should only happen when a long alias in English is added or it
had inconsistent spacing to begin with. For message arrays the problem
is much bigger.
While it's cute, and sometimes helpful, to align columns in files that
are manually maintained, this:
1) Has no benefit to localization done via BetaWiki
2) Obscures the actual changes made in a commit when the number of
columns gets bumped, making overall code maintenance more difficult.
-- brion
So, do you want remove padding from message arrays (in which case the
code could be simplified a lot if we removed those comments too),
magic words and aliases or only some subset of them?
--
Niklas Laxström