GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 631329
Misleading and unhelpful error messages
Last modified: 2019-02-27 15:15:27 UTC
I used gtranslator for the first time today and stumbled across several issues that nearly made me cry, because I did not understand what the program wanted from me: 1. I opened a .po file, translated one text and got: > There is an error in the message: > some header fields still have the initial default value Several things to note here: 1. This error has *nothing* to do with the "message" I just translated, because it refers to the file header 2. What are header fields? As a translator, I don't know about that. 3. If that's a problem, why didn't gtranslator open the header dialog instantly after opening the file? 4. If 3. does not get implemented, there should be a better message like > Header: Translation file problem > Text: Please fix the <a href="link-to-header-dialog">file header</a> first 2. After fixing the header, I got: > There is an error in the message: > invalid plural expression And again, some problems: 1. There is again no problem with the message itself but my profile settings (as I see it, but that's a guess, because I could not get rid of the error message) 2. Why didn't I get a validation error in the profile dialog? 3. Why does gtranslator care about that when I don't need it? 3. The program I want to translate provides a .pot (which is probably a .po template). I cannot open that with gtranslator, and gtranslator has no (or no for me obvious) way to generate a copy. Why isn't there a wizard or something that helps with that? Why do I get an empty application dialog and have to find out myself what to do now that I have started gtranslator? Sorry if those bug is rude, but I've been programming for a decade now and I don't get gtranslator to work.
yeah... gtranslator is far from easy in this sense :) Patches welcomed.
We are mass-closing old gtranslator issues as the latest versions of gtranslator (3.30 or later) should fix most of the reported problems and as there is unfortunately no capacity to retest all of them separately. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-February/msg00059.html If the issue described in this report still happens in gtranslator version 3.30 or later, please file a new ticket under https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtranslator/issues/ - thanks for your understanding! We are sorry that your report was not handled / fixed after you reported it - many free and open source software projects receive more bug reports and feature requests than they have developers who have free time to work on them. If you would like to get involved and contribute on gtranslator code, please check https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/Developers