Possible msgfmt BUG detected

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <alarfaj0 at yahoo dot com>]

Salam all,

TO make a long story short, how would you people translate:

%d file selected (%s)
%d files selected (%s)

Well, in Arabic, this would be:

ملف واحد
منتقى (%s)
ملفّان
منتقيان (%s)
%d ملفات
منتقاة (%s)
%d ملف منتقى (%s)

Well, apparently msgfmt doesnt like the first two strings (mufrad and muthanna)
and generates an error because we ommitted the %d. Please don't be distracted
by a red-herring, this is definitely not a problem with plural forms, its a
problem with the way msgfmt handles c-format arguments that just _happens_ to
only be an issue in plural strings in Arabic.

Because of the way Arabic is, we MUST ommit the %d in the first argument, and
this clashes with msgfmt's principles, which say you must not omit any c-format
arguments, ever.

Ossama said that we should bug gnome about the PO file that contains this
string, and ask them to change the single form English argument from "%d file
selected" to "1 file selected". Now its true this will fix the problem, but
only in this file. I feel this doesn't address the real issue, which is the way
msgfmt deals with c-format arguments. If we bug gnome this will fix this file
and if we bug msgfmt it will fix everything everywhere.

We need to make it understood that with Arabic, some c-format arguments just
need to be omitted, and thats that.

Any objections (who am I kidding of course there are objections... :P)

Abdulaziz,


		
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