GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 261066
Evolution addressbook message needs ngettext
Last modified: 2013-09-10 14:03:33 UTC
#: addressbook/gui/widgets/eab-gui-util.c:275 #, c-format msgid "" "Opening %d contacts will open %d new windows as well.\n" "Do you really want to display all of these contacts?" Please use ngettext in situations like these (see http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#plurals).
This was supposed to be fixed with the patch http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=43392 attached to bug 253464. It was committed on March 23rd, 2004 (check above bug report for reference). I suppose that the reason is that some Western-language-obfuscated programmer thought that it was enough that there's a check that there're more than 5 contacts before this warning message was issued. But, as we all know, this is not enough for many languages of the world. I remember discussing this with Toshok on IRC quite some time earlier, since he has committed the change and agreed to re-commit it (yeah, I should have created another bug report so I don't forget about it): 2004-03-24 Chris Toshok <toshok@ximian.com> * gui/widgets/eab-gui-util.c (eab_show_multiple_contacts): don't know what I was thinking approving this change. the _() was only used in the plural case (in fact where n > 5), so a singular case was never necessary, and neither was the call to ngettext.
Toshok, could you please fix this? As Danilo points out, you can't use English plural usage for deciding when to use ngettext() and when not. Even if n is always > 5, and English never uses singular for any n != 1, this varies with other languages. Other languages have more plural forms, and it can be that for example 1, 2, 3 use different plurals, and then also 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33 etc. and other numbers ending in the same digits in the same way. So n always being > 5 gives absolutely zero information on whether ngettext is needed or not.
Danilo, it seems the ngettext patch for this message has since been put back into place in CVS by toshok. Can this bug report be closed?
Indeed. Go ahead and close it (I don't believe I have the privileges to do that here).
I'm marking it as resolved now.
Marking resolved.