Subject: bug#19503: most translations of proper names aren't being used

From: Benno Schulenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 12:14:26 +0100

Hi,

Just now I noticed that 'du --version | tail -2' produces here this:

Verkita de Torbjern GRANLUND (Torbjörn Granlund), David MacKenzie, Paul Eggert
kaj Jim Meyering.

whereas I expected it to produce this:

Verkita de Torbjern GRANLUND (Torbjörn Granlund), David MEKENZI (David MacKenzie), Paŭl EGERT (Paul Eggert)
kaj Ĝim MEJERING (Jim Meyering).

Quite a few languages transcribe proper names to their own
writing system and phonology.  But coreutils, when a proper
name does not contain any UTF-8 characters, defines away the
propername() function, thus ignoring any transcription that
translators made for this name.  I think this is wrong and
that propername() should always be used, or at least that
disabling it should be optional.

If however propername() is never going to be used, then please
don't waste translator time by marking proper names as
translatable/transcribable.

The propername() function is defined to a noop in the system.h
file with the argument that it saves 17K on each executable.
But... shouldn't propername() be a library function that isn't
actually included into each and every util?

Benno

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