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Bug 532777 - Patch to use pretty quotes for various strings in file manager
Patch to use pretty quotes for various strings in file manager
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: nautilus
Classification: Core
Component: general
0.x.x [obsolete]
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Nautilus Maintainers
Nautilus Maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2008-05-12 14:47 UTC by Alexander “weej” Jones
Modified: 2008-07-04 21:20 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Patch (3.44 KB, patch)
2008-05-12 14:49 UTC, Alexander “weej” Jones
rejected Details | Review

Description Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-05-12 14:47:10 UTC
Just did a quick sweep over fm-directory-view to replace various uses of "%s" with “%s”.
Comment 1 Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-05-12 14:49:00 UTC
Created attachment 110770 [details] [review]
Patch
Comment 2 Christian Neumair 2008-05-13 11:08:10 UTC
Thanks for your efforts.

I like those quotes, but we need a GNOME-wide policy before switching to them. I am not sure which variant is considered correct in English. Reading through

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark

suggests that the proposed variant is used in literature.
Comment 3 Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-05-13 13:25:20 UTC
Definitely “ and ” (66's, 99's). They are classically unused in computing and typography because of the limited keys on a typewriter, and the fact that they’re not in any ASCII codepage.

Here in the 21st century, we have Unicode, and non-English locales frequently make use of, for example « and » for quotation marks. It’s time for English to look as beautiful as the rest of the languages we translate to!
Comment 4 Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-07-04 16:25:05 UTC
Are we going to do this then?
Comment 5 Christian Neumair 2008-07-04 18:08:15 UTC
As you know, I proposed the policy change on the desktop-devel-list, but it triggered a controversial discussion:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-May/msg00033.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-June/msg00048.html

The main concern by Alan Cox and others was that using "unescaped" UTF-8 characters inside source code (i.e. not "\x...", but UTF-8 encoding) is not allowed in C source code, and it is not supported by foreign compilers. While gcc supports it, it is a very tough argument, because we do not just target recent gcc compilers. That said, I am not sure whether it is worth the effort.

It was also proposed to explicitly translate the affected strings to en_* with "" -> “” conversions. I'm not a big fan of this - but this might be the onliest viable solution.
Comment 6 Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-07-04 19:12:04 UTC
There was an overwhelming rejection of Alan's concerns in favour of better typography and KISS principles. I will sooner eat my own face than waste my time catering for non-existant use cases.
Comment 7 Christian Neumair 2008-07-04 21:15:44 UTC
I am sorry, but the compiler issue may actually be a real-world problem, even though the other concerns were mostly theoretical.

I think you somewhat overreacted by just closing this bug report.
Comment 8 Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-07-04 21:20:14 UTC
No need to be sorry, let's just move on. I just wanted the patch and bug off my list.

Fair enough, we're not going to do this kind of stuff on a wider scale until we have a proper policy in place. In such event, this report is then pointless, as there are still many other places even within Nautilus where quotes could be converted.