[haiku-bugs] [Haiku] #6808: Drop the checksum field from catkeys file header
- From: "rq" <trac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:08:41 -0000
#6808: Drop the checksum field from catkeys file header
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Reporter: rq | Owner: pulkomandy
Type: bug | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: R1
Component: Kits/Locale Kit | Version: R1/alpha2
Keywords: | Blocked By:
Has a Patch: 0 | Platform: All
Blocking: |
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From discussions with PulkoMandy, it seems to me that the checksum field
in the catkeys header is superflous and could be dropped (PulkoMandy
doesn't think that way though). My reasons for dropping it are:
1) it's being used at compile time to ensure that the source strings have
not been altered, which is IMO not the best way to ensure integrity.
Instead, checks could be done at compile time, or a special script could
be developed to make checks for missing/obsolete strings easier. Here's an
example output of such app, used for Mozilla:
rq@sugar:~/src/mozilla/mercurial$ compare-locales mozilla-
central/browser/locales/l10n.ini . lt
lt
browser/feedback/main.properties
+testpilot.welcomePage.backgroundSurvey
+testpilot.welcomePage.pleaseTake
toolkit/chrome/global/headsUpDisplay.properties
+jsWorkspaceTitle
lt:
keys: 984
unchanged: 257
changed: 5257
missing: 3
95% of entries changed
2) the checksum is also used at runtime for the same purpose. Again, I
think it's even less useful in this case. At runtime, the application may
have five of fifty new strings that don't exist in my file anyway, and my
invalid string may have already been dropped. What's the point on
invalidating whole translation just based on that? I see none. Also,
PulkoMandy said that the checksum may at some point used to block outdated
translations from being used. If that were ever to happen, I suggest to
compute the effective checksum of a localization at runtime instead (which
has to be done anyway, at least for languages with fallbacks, like pt_BR).
3) if someone were to ever edit the catkeys files manually, the checksum
isn't easy to calculate.
4) the checksum doesn't say anything about the target language strings,
which means these can have any amount of errors, bad encoding and anything
else. This again mandates a compile-time check, which, once existing,
could be expanded to take over the checksums job anyway.
--
Ticket URL: <http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/6808>
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