Re: RFC: Clean up "show remote"

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:53:26 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> > > GCC seems to wrap using spaces even in i18n output; maybe we
> > > could do the same, if I am interpreting that right?).
> > 
> > If that's what GCC does, GCC is not doing TRT: wrapping on spaces
> > works for Latin and other similar languages, but can be dead wrong in
> > other scripts.
> 
> This would be a terrible shame.  I asked for opinions from a couple of
> GCC developers, and Paolo Bonzini suggested:
> 
> > if a translator is anal about where to break, he should use non-breaking spaces
> > (such as Unicode 160) and those answer false for iswspace
> 
> > iow, doing mbstowcs, breaking at iswspace, and converting back, should work.
> >  but it's sort of a mess
> 
> > ask eli if that's correct.  maybe it's not.
> 
> Is that right?

I'm not sure I understand what Paolo is saying.  If he is saying that
translators should bear the burden of forcing GDB not to break by
using NBSP, then I think it's ridiculous: software should help us, not
force us to work harder.

> If not, is there some forum where I could get a definitive answer?

For the definitive answer, look in the Unicode standard (not for the
faint at heart):

   http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/

> Right now we just write overlength messages to the screen.  I don't see
> how that can be an improvement over breaking them at whitespace instead
> of at the margins, but maybe I'm missing something?

I think, as long as we are not sure about how to solve this in
general, manually breaking into two messages is better than letting
code blissfully break at whitespace, because that leaves the job of
breaking in other languages to a (human) translator.