PATCH: translation of commands

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS]

Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org>:

> > Here's a patch which, I think, helps with the i18n of commands. A
> > translater may translate "help|?|" as "hilfe|help|?", for example, and
> > then any unambiguous prefix of "hilfe" or of "help" will be accepted.
> 
> Thanks for the path.  But I think that this gets too complicated for
> command line options.  It should be possible even for a non-english
> speaking user to enter some letters as described in the documentaion
> (which of course should be in her language).  Keeping the code clean
> is a major design issue.  

We could keep the code clean by using a general-purpose function for
interpreting commands, as I suggested in a subsequent message: a
function that does all the stuff involving unambiguous prefixes in one
place in a consistent way that programmers and translators can
understand.

> Translating Yes/No/Quit and leaving the english ones as alias is IMO
> okay, as users are often used to just hit the J key (German) or the
> Y-key.  

Probably, unless there is a language in which the translation of one
of the words starts with the same letter as one of the other words.
(Greek "ne", which means "yes", is a nice example of a confusing word;
but in Greek the word starts with ν [nu], really, so I don't know of a
real example of this problem.)

> So sorry, I will not apply this patch.

Good, because I now realise that it would be a bad idea to put such
complicated functionality in-line in the code. But I think we should
discuss this issue of translating commands and perhaps implement it
using a single function in one place, perhaps like the function I
suggested.

Edmund