GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 600101
Say "Blank" not "White space"
Last modified: 2009-11-07 05:55:37 UTC
This is my first patch, so I apologise if I have submitted it incorrectly, or made a mistake in the generation of the patch file. Please do kindly let me know where this should go if I have indeed made a mistake. This first patch of mine is very simple, it simpley changes the voicing of the string "white space" to "blank". I have done us english, english CA and british english translations. I'm not much good with my other languages, so thought I best leave that to a native, although if this is required to make the patch complete, I'm happy to do this with the help of google translater:) I find this patch makes using applications heavily reliant on flat-review much easier and more enjoyable to use. My favourite email client mutt is fantastic, and with the use of this patch, it has made me really consider using it under a gui full-time. Another point is that other screenreaders such as Speakup, the console screenreader, use the string blank. I would be interested in any thoughts. Thanks.
Created attachment 146554 [details] [review] Sorry, not sure if this uploaded:)
Sorry for the delay in reviewing this. The main question I have is that there is indeed a difference between a blank line with nothing on it at all and a line composed solely of whitespace. In one case, there's no content on the line and in the other, there is content (though it is just whitespace). Some people/things are very sensitive about the difference, so conflating both into just "blank" doesn't seem like the proper solution. In additon, I'm not sure which environment you are running mutt under, but you might be encountering a VTE bug if you are using gnome-terminal. This bug ends up turning blank lines into lines composed of whitespace. For specific comments about the patch itself -- there already is a "blank" string used throughout the code to represent blank lines. So, if we were to make the change, we should use "blank" instead of "Blank" (i.e., don't change the capitalization) to reduce the amount of work the translators need to do since "blank" and "Blank" would both need to be translated. In addition, changing just the code should be sufficient -- we generally try to stay away from making changes to the *.po files. So, turning "white space" into "blank" in the code is the more preferable thing to do rather than hacking the translated form. The patch also seems to have some odd indentation around some of the "#" lines -- these should align with the rest of the code. Now...for what to do about the real dilemma, which is the need for being able to express the difference between a blank line and a line with just white space on it. One might consider changing the use of "blank" to "empty" and replace the use of "white space" with "blank". Or, one might consider getting the VTE bug fixed. In any case, I think this is a duplicate of bug #397668. :-) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 397668 ***
I have applied the patch and it works as expected.