Re: Before l10n, better practices for (message) ?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 23 May 2017 12:38:29 +0900
> 
> 
> > On May 23, 2017, at 11:55, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> I'm currently going through package.el and the easiest solution I have for now is replace things like "%d package%s to install" (where %s is "s" depending on whether %d is greater than 1...) into "Number of packages to install: %d.".
> > 
> > Just replace it with 2 different spellings dispatched by the number.
> 
> I know we don't have l10n now, but what you propose is also based on the grammatical assumption that we have only 2 possible forms so I would try to avoid that too.

Having 2 forms is as close to the ideal as we can have, given that we
don't have infrastructure for more complicated cases.  Introducing
functions that will meanwhile do nothing non-trivial doesn't sound a
good idea to me; such functions will only make sense when they
actually support non-trivial plurals (and for that, we need first to
figure out how to select the language into which any given message
needs to be translated).

> > We don't have any mechanisms that I know of, and won't have until the
> > large part of the i10n issues is resolved by motivated individuals.
> 
> I guess I just found something to do in the coming months... :)
> 
> What I'll do is propose a patch for package.el that makes UI strings the most linguistically neutral possible (within my understanding of English), and after discussing the changes, if we can use that as a base to create a list of "best practices", I'll use that to check the other packages included in the distribution.

I'm not sure package.el is a good starting point.  I think a much
better starting point is to design the i10n infrastructure for Emacs.