Accelerators missing from dialogs in KDE 4.3

[Stephan Kulow]

Am Samstag 25 Juli 2009 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> A Dimarts, 7 de juliol de 2009, Stephan Kulow va escriure:
> > Am Montag 29 Juni 2009 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> > > A Dilluns, 29 de juny de 2009, Andreas Pakulat va escriure:
> > > > On 29.06.09 12:19:18, David Faure wrote:
> > > > > On Friday 05 June 2009, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > > > > > Apart from that this is actually not the purpose (and never has
> > > > > > been) of KAcceleratorManager - at least not in the way it used
> > > > > > right now. The purpose was to use this during development to
> > > > > > easily find good accelerator keys and then assign them in code/ui
> > > > > > files.
> > > > >
> > > > > Did coolo confirm that? Because it doesn't match what I remember
> > > > > from kde3 times. I distinctly remember that the goal was to have it
> > > > > done automatically when no accels were specified by the app
> > > > > developer explicitely.
> > > >
> > > > Well, that was what I gathered from the commits and source code, when
> > > > it was broken some time ago and fixed by Albert. There's a comment in
> > > > the code that activates the auto-assignment that suggests it wasn't
> > > > meant to be used during runtime, but during development to find good
> > > > accelerators.
> > > >
> > > > Can't find the commits easily at the moment and neither remember the
> > > > code file where the comment was.
> > >
> > > Stephan, can you clarify if the goal for KAcceleratorManager automatic
> > > accelerator assignment was:
> > >  a) have it done automatically when no accels were specified by the app
> > > developer explicitely and so should be always enabled
> > >  b) have a translators/developers tool but KAcceleratorManager
> > > automatic accelerator assignment should be generally disabled
> >
> > Hi Albert,
> >
> > The assignment should be done automatically as history proved that it's
> > impossible for a developer and even less possible for a translator to
> > pick accelerators that do not clash all the time. So my goal was to
> > remove the accelerators from the code in general and only leave those
> > that are really essential to the user, e.g. always have them on standard
> > actions and assign the free letters by an algorithm.
>
> Ok, so we can see here that Coolo's intention was to remove accelerators
> altogether from code and let KAcceleratorManager manage everything.
>
> From the i18n point of view not having accelerators in strings to translate
> is not good as non latin1 languages like Japanese do things like
>
> msgid "&Source:"
> msgstr "ソース(&S):"
>
> And without the & marker they can't know if they have to add one.
>
> So having automatic accelerator assignment is good for developers and
> latin1 users but not for the broad i18n community.
>
> So I see three possibilities here:
>  a) Always use automatic accelerator assignment and ignore the i18n problem
>  b) Try to add as much accelerators in code as possible but leave the
> automatic accelerator enabled so that it somehow works if the developer is
> not careful enough
>  c) Disable the automatic accelerator altogether and force developers to
> put correct accelerators
>
> I'm on b) because c) is asking for the impossible.

d) use dummy accelators in code to mark the string to be translated into (&X)
  by !latin languages and change the automatic acclerator to translate '(&X)'
  into '(&<fitting letter)'

Then what you ask from the programmers is simple, what you ask from the "latin
translators" is simple (either leave it out completly or use dummy as well) 
and what you ask from !latin translators is possible too.

The only challenge left is how to mark dummy so that the automatic will know.
I would suggest pick the last letter in the word - this is so unusual that
it's a good choice to mark.

Greetings, Stephan