Re: Bikeshedding advice on the ab/i18n-scripts series

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 22:58, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> Ahh, perhaps I was the one who said something stupid like:
>>
>>       echo >&2 "$(cmd)"
>>
>> should be equivalent to
>>
>>       cmd >&2
>>
>> which is not the case when output from cmd does not end with a single LF
>> (i.e. either an incomplete line, or with trailing blank lines).
>>
>> Sorry, if that is what you are trying to address, please let me take that
>> back.
>
> Having said that, depending on how the strings are distributed, I have a
> feeling that we might be better off having two variants:
>
>        say >&2 "<message string>"
>        gettext >&2 "<message string>"
>
> The former would be
>
>        say () {
>                gettext >&2 "$1"; echo
>        }
>
> and minority of callers (they may be an empty set) that care about
> trailing blank lines they output can include their own terminating LFs in
> the message to be translated and call gettext directly, letting it output
> the translation without stripping trailing LFs they (or their translation)
> produce.

That would require us to start extracting strings from all "say"
functions. The reason we have only "gettext" and "eval_gettext" is so
xgettext can extract them.

I'd like to keep that simplicity. Let's not go and wrap these
functions for trivial aesthetics at the cost of complexity.