GNU bug report logs - #15054
df: "block" is not a French(+) word

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Filipus Klutiero <chealer <at> gmail.com>
To: bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org
Subject: df: "block" is not a French(+) word
Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 23:54:10 -0400

My df outputs something like:
> Sys. de fichiers blocks de 1K  Utilisé Disponible Uti% Monté sur
> /dev/sda5            37534240 24181584   11439364  68% /
> udev                    10240        0      10240   0% /dev
> tmpfs                  756064      572     755492   1% /run
> tmpfs                    5120        0       5120   0% /run/lock
> tmpfs                 1845740        4    1845736   1% /run/shm
> /dev/sdc3            20641788 16697020    2896128  86% /mnt/work

In English, the header would be:
> Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on

So "1K-blocks" is translated to "blocks de 1K". It turns out that this isn't a problem in the po file:

> #. TRANSLATORS: this is the "1K-blocks" header in "df" output.
> #. TRANSLATORS: this is the "1024-blocks" header in "df -P".
> #: src/df.c:545 src/df.c:554
> #, c-format
> msgid "%s-%s"
> msgstr "%2$s de %1$s"

The po file does its best given the msgid given, but it's not given the opportunity to translate "block" itself, which is "bloc" in French. For French, this simply looks like a typo/translato. In Spanish and many other languages, this must be more striking.

I believe this can be fixed by calling gettext with a string built using a string already translated by gettext.

A very different approach would be to reconsider the "block" terminology in df. 1K here is not a block size in the technical sense, it's merely the display unit. When run with --human-readable, there is no need to put unit information in the header, as each cell indicates the unit. Instead of displaying the unit, the header then reads "Size". Which makes you realize that this header actually applies to the 3 size columns.

So enabling human-readable by default would fix this. I thought the disadvantage was verbosity, but human-readable balances verbosity and precision very well and is actually shorter. So the only disadvantage is the generally smaller precision. Even for the precise/fixed-unit mode, at least in French, displaying the unit in each cell would still be more compact than the current approach on my system.

-- 
Filipus Klutiero
http://www.philippecloutier.com

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