481966 - l10n needs different entities for 'to: you' and 'from: you' in message header

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect, P1)

Description

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

Bug 456818 introduced the entity headerFieldYou=You

As far as I can see, this one string is used for "to: you" and "from: you" in message header pane. In German and maybe in other languages we need an other string for "from: you", because it must be "An: Sie" and "Von: Ihnen".

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Blocking; this looks really clumsy in German.

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Yesterday's accidental closure of the parent bug 478466 brought my attention back to this issue and the localization problem. The "headerFieldYou" is used deep down in AddExtraAddressProcessing() of msgHdrViewOverlay.js (the only occurence), which is called by updateEmailAddressNode(), in turn called by OutputEmailAddresses(), but also defined in mailWidgets.xml,and then this is somehow associated with the header names. Thus, each of those headers would have to be extended with a directional attribute to distinguish "to" and "from" context, assuming that this is the maximum case for all locales (are we sure that it is, or does this only shift the problem to other issues for other languages?). Then, that information has to ripple down the chain of calls to be considered in AddExtraAddressProcessing() again to take the correct variant. Sounds like a quite bit of overhead for a feature which - frankly - is rather questionable to start with...

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

It's not terribly pretty, thanks to the loveliness that is this code, but it's fortunately a little less painful than that.  Basically, my impl strategy is to simply attach the header name to the mail-emailaddress binding, and then in AddExtraAddressProcessing, use that name to parameterize the string that we get from the properties file.  If a header-specific string isn't found, we just fall back to generic one.

Comment 4

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Attachment: make different versions of "You" separately localized, v1

Comment 5

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Attachment: patch, v2

I evidently forgot to type "hg qrefresh" before I uploaded the last patch.  Here's the one I actually meant to upload!

Comment 6

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Attachment: patch, v3

That was a completely different wrong version, which appears to have come about due to Firefox pre-resolving symlinks and caching the result, so that if a symlink changes behind it's back, Bad Things Happen.  And again...

Comment 7

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Comment on attachment 398437 [details] [diff] [review]
patch, v3

r=me if you take out your trailing whitespace, though I was looking forward to the earlier "Youse" version :)

Comment 8

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Trailing whitespace removed and pushed:

http://build.mozillamessaging.com/mercurial/comm-central/rev/f54a419c4abc

"Youse" is gonna have to wait for the en-NJ localization, I think.