Code review comment for lp:~songofacandy/bzr/i18n

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> This is not a real issue, just a cosmetic one.
>
> The feedback I get is that developers prefer writing the shorter _() to a translatable message than the longer and perhaps less readable gettext(). This has been the standard practice for nearly all localizable Open Source projects I've seen. The only exception that I can think of off the top of my head is bzr-gtk, where i18n() is used.
>
> Why is is an issue in bzr but not in all other Python projects that make use of gettext?

Because developers (such as myself) have a higher tendency to break into
the debugger in the middle of an active session (because we trap SIGQUIT
to do just that), and once you have done so _() breaks all future
running of the program because the builtin _() gets overridden.

Going further, I don't think bzr directly gains by putting i18n around
the code base. We generally *don't* want to be handing around translated
strings. We just want to translate at the point we display to the user
(as much as possible).

Also, why write _() in your code everywhere when there are very
deterministic locations where translatable strings reside. (Such as
Command.__doc__.)

John
=:->
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