Add `xlat!()` where necessary #1386

squell · 2025-12-10T19:35:32Z

Principle followed: only "ordinary" user-facing messages need to be translated; that is stuff that is helpful or indicates error conditions outside of our or the system administrator's control.

I.e. a parse error in /etc/sudoers does not fall in that category, and neither do runtime errors or other obscure error conditions that indicate an error condition in operating system, etc.

To achieve this, I followed the algorithm:

Display impl's for Error types are user facing
Anything that goes into user_error/info/warn is user facing. There might be some false positives here (i.e. things that are really "obscure errors")
Looked at strings in the code base that go into an "Error" object, println, format, and of course anything dealing with the CLI.
Looked at al the remaining string literals to see what was missed. 😵‍💫

I'm pleased to report the xlat!() mechanism seems to work well.

Side-catch: in user-facing strings wherever I saw them I replaced "`" with "'", and tried to make capitalization consistent with the rest of the class.

…isudo)

we don't intend to translate sudoers-related error messages at this point; the existence of this error message is a bit of a kludge: it should end up in the "diagnostic" list we compile in sudoers/mod.rs so visudo can handle it.

…lat!` this is a more restricted, subset of what format_args accepts; if in the future we get clippy lints about this, we should be prepared to silence them

src/sudo/pipeline/list.rs

src/sudoers/ast.rs

src/sudo/edit.rs

src/sudo/cli/mod.rs

src/sudo/cli/help_edit.rs

src/log/mod.rs

src/lib.rs

squell · 2025-12-15T15:58:40Z

Note: the visudo ask_response function has been changed to use Lines for reading input. I don't know why this wasn't done before (maybe some fear of buffering?) but it works; I felt like correctly handling multibyte input at this stage would really be re-inventing the wheel.

src/sudo/edit.rs

src/visudo/mod.rs

and accept "y" as a universal affirmative response

squell added 3 commits December 10, 2025 19:31

allow superfluous , in macro invocations and take value by reference

df97dab

make visudo version not needing translation (and unambiguous wrt. ogv…

e271621

…isudo)

squell added this to the i18n milestone Dec 10, 2025

squell linked an issue Dec 10, 2025 that may be closed by this pull request

Add localization support #1334

Closed

squell force-pushed the l10n-tag branch 3 times, most recently from 2bd30d6 to 8c860a4 Compare December 10, 2025 22:21

squell added 2 commits December 10, 2025 23:27

translate first batch of error msgs

7a6eb0e

translate sudo --list --list

395b169

squell force-pushed the l10n-tag branch 4 times, most recently from 28307ca to 2e8790f Compare December 11, 2025 19:30

squell and others added 7 commits December 11, 2025 20:53

translate selected format!/print strings in sudo

3c81343

rewrite user_error/info/warn to conform to the syntax supported by `x…

cc2684e

…lat!` this is a more restricted, subset of what format_args accepts; if in the future we get clippy lints about this, we should be prepared to silence them

write loggers to use translation

f3760fd

translate remaining "naked" user-facing strings

40807a8

translate help msgs + globally export xlat macros

3ec8817

update pot file

f4443c3

update compliance tests

8d349a6

squell force-pushed the l10n-tag branch from 2e8790f to 8d349a6 Compare December 11, 2025 19:56