The "$USER's Home" item on the desktop has many implications on translation.

In Swedish, the rules for genitivum is that an "s" is only added if the word
does not end in an s-like sound, both in singular and plural. Hence, as it is
now, it is impossible to translate correctly into languages like Swedish, as the
"'s" only seems to get tacked on regardless of the nature of the user name, even
when the user name ends in an s-like sound.
What makes this situation even worse is that Swedish does not use an apostrophe
in genitivum, only an "s", so the problem becomes even more obvious. Clearly,
strings like "menthoss hem", with two "s", are not pleasant.

darin@bentspoon.com summed the issues with the Home string up in four points:
1) translation
2) lower-case letter
3) just tacking on "'s"
4) login names just "don't mix" with plain natural language text

A suggestion from mjs@noisehavoc.org was just using "Home", and not using a user name
in this string at all.
My suggestion is using something like "My Home", since "Home" could be mistaken
for the directory "/home".



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-28 15:38:31 ----

I think Arlo and Gene should decide what to do about this.

Marking P6/PR3 so that Don can set an appropriate priority/milestone.



------- Additional Comments From don@eazel.com 2000-12-28 15:51:16 ----

Let's get this right for PR3.  It's just so ... visible.

BTW, this is related to bug #45336.




------- Additional Comments From arlo@workthatmouse.com 2001-01-02 13:48:50 ----

<I don't know how Linux i18n works>



I don't think there's anyting wrong with the way we're doing this... we just 

need to make sure that whoever does the localized versions knows where 

to go to change how  this works.





</I don't know how Linux i18n works>



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2001-01-02 14:01:15 ----

I understand Arlo's remark to mean that the use of a leading lower-case letter in login 
names, tacking on "'s" to the login name and, "login names 'just don't mix' with plain 
natural language text" are all not problems for the English language version in his 
opinion. He likes it as-is.

He doesn't propose a design for other languages. I'm not sure who's going to come up 
with that. A translator could decide to just use "Home" or "My Home" in a particular 
translation,  I guess.



------- Additional Comments From don@eazel.com 2001-01-02 14:09:10 ----

This seems reasonable (meaning Darin's comment).  And what I meant by "get this
right for PR3" -- make a decision about this.  If our decision is that
translators should just use their idiom for "Home" or "My Home" then this bug is
"fixed."  The only question is how do we inform the translators of this
decision?




------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2001-01-02 14:11:02 ----

Informing the translators is easy. We just put a comment on the line before the string, 
and translators will see it.



------- Additional Comments From arlo@workthatmouse.com 2001-01-10 17:39:00 ----

This method is acceptable for the English version.  We will attempt to add 
comments to the code in order to facilitate where translation should take 
place.



------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-01-12 16:53:35 ----

Bug report represents an engineering decision which I'm not qualified to
meaningfully contest. Rubber-stamping as verified.



------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2001-01-12 17:06:19 ----

The comments mentions adding an explanatory comment to translators at this
string, but this comment is not present yet. Reopening.



------- Additional Comments From arlo@workthatmouse.com 2001-01-13 14:01:31 ----

Can you, or another engineer deal with this?



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2001-01-15 13:54:20 ----

Time estimate represents the time to add a comment.



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2001-01-15 15:46:40 ----

Comment is added.



------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-01-15 20:30:15 ----

Hi, Christian! Could you possibly confirm that the comment is to your
satisfaction? Thank you!



------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2001-01-16 16:37:10 ----

This is the comment present:

#. Note to translators: If it's hard to compose a good home
#. * icon name from the user name, you can use a string without
#. * an "%s" here, in which case the home icon name will not
#. * include the user's name, which should be fine.

I think this comment is great. But there is one issue: When you intentionally
leave out an %s in the translated message, msgfmt (the po file check program)
will report a fatal error when you check the file's syntax. To get around this,
I had to add a "%.0s" to the translated message (an int zero-padding really;
thanks to norpan, d95mback@dtek.chalmers.se, and rhult@hem.passagen.se for this
tip).

I don't think all translators know how to get around this with using the %.0s
trick. Maybe this could also be described in the comment, in case the translator
decides not to use the login name in the translated message and don't know how
to get around the po syntax error.




------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-02-09 11:28:05 ----

Duane is now the proud owner for Desktop QA.



------- Additional Comments From sullivan@eazel.com 2001-02-12 09:27:51 ----

*** Bug 46512 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***



------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2001-02-13 16:59:17 ----

This is the relevant comment, from fm-desktop-icon-view.c, that translators see:

#. Note to translators: If it's hard to compose a good home
#. * icon name from the user name, you can use a string without
#. * an "%s" here, in which case the home icon name will not
#. * include the user's name, which should be fine. To avoid a
#. * warning, put "%.0s" somewhere in the string, which will
#. * match the user name string passed by the C code, but not
#. * put the user name in the final string.

Marking this as verified.



------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:48 -------