Subject: bug#44248: Indentation of --help and --version

From: Roland Illig <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 01:03:19 +0100

Hi,

As the German translator of coreutils, I fixed the indentation of the
--help output today, for coreutils 8.31.90.  While doing that, I noticed
that the option "-z, --zero-terminated" is used by several programs that
have different "native" indentation widths.  Therefore their --help
output looks inconsistent.  The affected programs are: join shuf sort
uniq.  Could you perhaps give each of these programs its own message,
properly indented to match the other options?

I also noticed that the --help and --version strings are only translated
once, which is good as it saved me some boring work.  But they are
indented at a different width than the other options.  Some of the
programs add an empty line before the --help and --version lines, which
looks ok.  Several others do not add a line, which looks wrong.  This
should be consistent among all coreutils.

In src/cat.c:115, the German translation for the first example takes 2
lines instead of 1.  The second line should be aligned nicely with the
first line, but there's no way to know beforehand how long the %s from
the first line will be, since the program name may be prefixed with "g"
or "gnu-" or pretty much any other string.  What is the correct way of
solving this problem?

Roland