Notes for hg translation

[Martin Geisler]

Fabian <fabian.kreutz+google at starnet.fi> writes:

> This concerns a discussion that I started with Martin Geisler. He
> suggested to move the discussion into the mailing list.
>
>>> I was not sure because of the "bookmarks" extension. In it there is
>>> one very long description text in the modul docs (of which only the
>>> first line will be displayed on the "hg help" page. And additionally a
>>> long text for the bookmark function.
>
> It just happened for extdiff again. Here the two texts are
> significantly different and only the one that is not shown contains
> examples.
>
> It is pretty demotivating for me because I first translate the non-
> shown text (many many lines, multiple paragraphs) and only realize it,
> when another big block comes further down.

Yeah, I can understand that this is annoying and how feels like wasted
work... :-(

Right now, my best advise is to only translate strings you've seen
before. Perhaps even leave extensions you don't use to someone else.
They can then check 'hg help foo' to see if 'foo' is a command or an
extension name.

But we should still try to solve this. Perhaps the help command could
get a --all option which will make it print both the extension docstring
and the command docstring. But that is still unsatisfactiory since few
will remember to use it, and so, say, the nice module docstring in the
bookmarks extension will still be sort of hidden.

(That is the docstring which explains the secret git-like behaviour one
can get by adding the following configuration option to your .hgrc::

  [bookmarks]
  track.current = True
)

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/attachments/20090928/3a100f5e/attachment.pgp