On 15/07/2008, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Lately I've seen a lot of diffs to .i18n files that look like this:
- (50 lines with one number of spaces in them)
- (51 lines with a different number of spaces in them, and one of the
lines is new)
I've been long doing review using whitespace insensitive diffs. The commit emails are just unsuitable for doing i18n review, and they are always truncated anyways.
I think it would greatly simplify change tracking if we used more consistent spacing in the localization files, eg changing this:
'Search' => array( 'Sichen' ),
'Resetpass' => array( 'Passwuert zrécksetzen' ),
to this:
'Search' => array( 'Sichen' ),
'Resetpass' => array( 'Passwuert zrécksetzen' ),
That should only happen when a long alias in English is added or it had inconsistent spacing to begin with. For message arrays the problem is much bigger.
While it's cute, and sometimes helpful, to align columns in files that are manually maintained, this:
Has no benefit to localization done via BetaWiki
Obscures the actual changes made in a commit when the number of
columns gets bumped, making overall code maintenance more difficult.
-- brion
So, do you want remove padding from message arrays (in which case the code could be simplified a lot if we removed those comments too), magic words and aliases or only some subset of them?