Reclassify Icon= in .desktop files as string, not localestring

[Bollinger, John C]

> We could change Gettext to stop considering the Icon key as translatable *without* changing the specification, but that would be a violation of the spec

Would it?  The spec does not say that localestrings are translatable.  It says that they are _localizable_, in a specific technical sense that the spec lays out.  That is, different values can be provided for different locales by use of locale postfixes, and lookup by key is expected to take those into account in light of LC_MESSAGES when determining the value associated with the key.

That most keys with localestring values are best localized by translating their values between human languages is a function of the significance of specific keys, not of the data type.

> , and the Gettext maintainers don't want to commit to that violation; which is why Will is asking to fix the spec, in order to unblock the catch-22 situation with Gettext developers waiting for a change to the spec, and the spec maintainers waiting for a change in the localisation software.

I claim that the Gettext maintainers are interpreting the spec wrongly.  Evidently that misinterpretation is fairly common, hence the prevalence of “don’t translate this” comments on Icon keys, but on the other hand, the prevalence of such comments also conveys that it is widely understood that Icon keys should not be localized by translation (and, it follows, maybe not at all).


Regards,

John

--
John.Bollinger at StJude.org


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