Subject: Re: [bug#38436] [PATCH] gnu: Add gfortran-toolchain

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2019 15:38:15 +0100

Hi,

Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> There’s this weird requirement that for the sake of i18n, we must not
>> construct synopses/descriptions like this:
>>
>>   https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Synopses-and-Descriptions.html
>
> Is that a specific rule for Guix?

Specific to the ‘guix-package’ domain, even.

Concretely, the idea is that <package> objects carry the untranslated
English-language synopsis and description.  This is useful for things
like ‘guix search’ or for web page generators, because they can query
translation explicitly when they need it.

We could allow constructed strings in there, like this:

  (package
    ;; …
    (synopsis (format #f (G_ "This is a ~a compiler") "C")))

But in that case, we’d have to perform translation right in the ‘G_’
call, and thus <package> would end up carrying a translated string.

So far we’ve managed to avoid that, it’s a constraint, but hopefully one
we can live with.

I hope that makes sense!

Ludo’.