bugGNU gettext - Bugs: bug #64025, PATCH: Use the right BCP47...

 
 

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bug #64025: PATCH: Use the right BCP47 language format in XML mode for xml:lang

Submitter:  Matthias Klumpp <matk>
Submitted:  Tue 11 Apr 2023 10:53:24 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  XML Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  None Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Open

Tue 11 Apr 2023 10:53:24 AM UTC, original submission:  

Hello!
This is a spicy issue, which is why I am sending in this preliminary patch (it likely does need a test case to be merged).

I was recently investigating why AppStream components sometimes are properly translated into the user's native language, and sometimes are not. The issue came down to the translated XML data itself: Some XML files had locale in their xml:lang tags in the form of "zh_TW" and some had "zh-TW". I looked it up, and apparently the IETF mandates the BCP47 language format[1] (with a dash) if the xml:lang tag is used. Some tools, like itstool, do this correctly, and even msgfmt does use the right language if manually specified (which some build systems seem to do), however any application using msgfmt in bulk mode on XML during its localization process will end up with POSIX locale strings in xml:lang tags instead.
This is what Meson does, so a huge amount of apps is affected now.

At the moment, looking just at AppStream data, we have a confusing mess of different locale strings, depending how the build system of the individual application was configured (pretty much all of KDE uses BCP47, while all of GNOME uses POSIX for example).
While I originally wanted to ignore the issue and just continue to use POSIX locale, the fact that some projects translate it one way and others another way makes solving this issue for good impossible and it will never stop haunting us until it is fixed for good. It is especially frustrating for translators who have no means to do anything about it. Furthermore, there actually exists a specification which mandates how xml:lang has to look like, so the right solution(tm) would be to follow it.

Fortunately that is relatively easy to do for 99.9% of all cases.
The attached patch makes msgfmt use BCP47 for xml:lang in XML bulk mode, which
makes it follow the IETF recommendation and match other tools such as
itstool. This patch implements the same conversion logic as used by itstool to convert POSIX locale to BCP47, so we should have wide compatibility.

This is a disruptive change though - while some locale like "de" are the same in POSIX and BCP47, so nobody will notice the change (which is also the reason why we only noticed this now - thanks to our Chinese-speaking community for bringing this to our attention!), others such as "sr@latin" will become "sr-Latn" and "ca@valencia" will become "ca-vanlencia".

Feedback on this issue as well as the patch is very welcome!

Thank you & kind regards,
    Matthias Klumpp

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag

Matthias Klumpp <matk>

 

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Attached Files
file #54600:  gettext-bcp47_v1.patch added by matk (7KiB - text/x-patch - Preliminary patch)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

Carbon-Copy List
  • -email is unavailable- added by haible (Updated the item)
  • -email is unavailable- added by matk (Submitted the item)
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    Follow 2 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2023-04-11 haible CategoryNone XML
    2023-04-11 matk Attached File- Added gettext-bcp47_v1.patch, #54600

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