[DRE-maint] Bug#840878: ruby-gettext: rxgettext --wrap breaks words!

[Francesco Poli (wintermute)]

Package: ruby-gettext
Version: 3.2.2-1
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Hello,
I noticed that rxgettext, when used with the --wrap option, wraps
long message lines by breaking words.

I think this is awkward and should be avoided.
Wrapping of long message lines should be performed by searching the
nearest whitespace before the page width boundary and breaking there.

I prepared a patch to implement the desired behavior.
It is attached (file wrap-without-breaking-words.diff.gz).

My patch only changes the regular expression used to perform the
line scanning.
The new regexp consists of three alternatives:

  * the first alternative deals with chunks which reach the end of
    a line and whose length is less than or equal to the page width:
    these chunks will not be broken any further

  * the second alternative deals with the (rare) chunks which consist
    of a single word whose length is greater than or equal to the page
    width: these chunks will be considered as unbreakable (even though
    this means that the output will include a line longer than the
    page width, as a rare exception to the general wrapping rule)

  * the third alternative deals with chunks ending with a whitespace
    and whose length is less than or equal to the page width: these
    chunks will be as large as possible (regexp repetition matching
    is greedy by default) and will not be broken any further

The regexp behavior is shown in the attached little test script
(file test.rb.gz).

Please apply my patch and/or forward it upstream.

Thanks for your time!


N.B.: I am not sure my patch is creative enough to be copyrighted by
      me; at any rate, I hereby release both my patch and the little
      test script under the same licensing terms as the po_entry.rb
      file (that is to say: Ruby or GPL-2 or LGPL-3+).


-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (800, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.7.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages ruby-gettext depends on:
ii  ruby         1:2.3.0+4
ii  ruby-locale  2.1.2-1
ii  ruby-text    1.3.0-1

ruby-gettext recommends no packages.

ruby-gettext suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information
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