[parted-devel] including author names in --version output

[Jim Meyering]

Andrew Clausen <clausen at econ.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 03:19:14PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> >> Not that this decision has anything to do with me...  if you want to
>> >> maximize incentives for people to contribute, then you should fill the
>> >> screen up with every contributor's name!
>> >
>> > Yes, I agree. I think this could be done using a variable on config.h
>> > and parsing the AUTHORS file.
>>
>> I've looked at that, and have encountered some problems.
>> First, when there are 10 or more authors, gnulib's version-etc.c
>> abbreviates the list, printing only the first nine:
>>   ...
>>   Written by %s, %s, %s,\n%s, %s, %s, %s,\n%s, %s, and others.\n"),
>
> Wouldn't it be better to do
>
> 	Written by %s

Certainly something else would be better.
I'm not sure what, though.

>> while there are 44 names listed in AUTHORS.
>> ----------------------------
>> But that's not a big deal.
>> I'll either fix the version_etc function to do what I want to use
>> some other mechanism.
>>
>> Another complication:
>> the #define AUTHORS _("name1"), _("name2"), ...
>> strings must be ASCII.
>
> Can't they be UTF8?

xgettext requires that those strings be ASCII.

> If they can't, then it should be straightforward to generate a file
> authors.h (eg by the configure script).
>
> I don't think the translators would appreciate all the pollution in the message
> catalogs.

Only the few with non-ASCII characters would have to be
marked for translation, so there wouldn't be much pollution.

Anyway, it's moot, now, since I think we've agreed that
simply using the .../AUTHORS URL is the way to go.