lint-po-args

Checks for grave translation errors and typos, like translating "please use the -0 option" as "bitte nutze die -O Option", which is a different command-line option and likely won't work.

In particular, this script checks:

• Command-line flags
• (optionally) any printf-style format instructions

This little project was motivated by the following translation bug:

$ echo "oo'f" | xargs echo
xargs: Fehlendes korrespondierendes Anführungszeichen einfache; per Vorgabe sind Anführungszeichen für xargs bestimmt, sofern Sie nicht die Option -O verwenden
$ echo "oo'f" | LC_ALL=C xargs echo
xargs: unmatched single quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option

This project already finds real-life issues.

My goal is to make this some kind of successor in spirit to POFileChecker, which was removed from Debian for using Python 2. However, lint-po-args is not yet ready to be packaged.

Table of Contents

• Background
• Usage
• Development
• TODOs
• TODONT
• Contribute

Background

Command-line options usually are not translated. If some option is called ./foo --output, then it is extremely unlikely that ./foo --ausgabe does anything useful. Likewise, if some option is called xargs -0 (with the digit zero), then suggesting xargs -O (with the capital letter o) is unlikely to be useful.

However, these errors absolutely happen: Sometimes a translator slips up, accidentally translates a keyword or a hardcoded option name, or misreads a msgid (the raw "original" message, often written in English), or a typo happens, or any number of other problems. That's fine, bugs happen.

Let's detect and fix these bugs!

The xargs example shows that this is a real-life usecase that hasn't been fixed for over a year. This tool tries to reveal all of them.

Usage

Just call it with the path to your .po file, for example: ./lint_po_args.py de.po

Full usage:

lint_po_args.py [-h] [--show-parsed-translations] [--lint-printf] filenames [filenames ...]

Checks for grave translation errors and typos in command-line options,
and optionally also printf-style instructions.

positional arguments:
  filenames
        Paths to the PO file(s)

options:
  -h, --help
        show this help message and exit
  --show-parsed-translations
        Show all translations (useful to debug the parser)
  --lint-printf
        Also check printf-style instructions

Note that plural support and any other "high-level" features are broken/missing, simply because I had to write my own PO-parser.

Development

• I'm somewhat new to mypy, so the "typing" stuff might not be perfect. Improvements welcome! For new code, please try to include something more reasonable than Any.
• mypy finds no issues.
• No errors/warnings in pyflakes3.
• pylint only generates nuisance warnings (documentation, "long lines", etc.)
• black only suggests changes that make the code harder to read, like inserting linebreaks in weird places

TODOs

• Extend/replace the parser
  • Most importantly, plural support
• Does the regex need to be made more robust?
• Slightly more targeted hints would be nice, like a better diff on the list of detections (cmdlineargs/printf).
• Should the order matter? printf yes, cmdline maybe, interleaved … hard to say. Think more about that.
• Nicer support for running this on "all" .po files of a project?
• Fix all the problems with translations everywhere. ;-)

TODONT

• I don't aim to make this a replacement for POFileChecker. That said, if you find inspiration in it and extend this linter, I'd be happy to merge it!
• I'm not sure whether I even want this to be packaged, since this is such a highly-specialized lint. If you think about including this in Debian, please contact me, I'm sure we can work out something awesome :)

Contribute

Feel free to dive in! Open an issue or submit PRs.