many strings in UI lack context required for translators

[Steve Langasek]

There are many strings for translation in subiquity that consist of an adjective/modifier, while leaving it unclear what the noun is that they modify.

This makes it impossible to correctly translate the strings without digging around in the source, to any language that requires noun-adjective grammatical agreement.

We need to work out what the subjects are and annotate the source so that this is visible to translators.

Examples:

Automatic (DHCP)
Manual
Disabled

from source, it appears these are the "Method" of configuring the network.

not connected (../subiquitycore/ui/views/network.py:180)
disabled (../subiquitycore/ui/views/network.py:232)

Is this a "device" that's not connected? An "interface"?

existing (../subiquity/models/filesystem.py:423)
new (../subiquity/models/filesystem.py:425)

existing or new what? disks? partitions? filesystems?

unused (../subiquity/models/filesystem.py:459 ../subiquity/models/filesystem.py:464)

This one is tricky, because it's returned both for filesystems that are not mounted and for devices containing no filesystem. So I think we have to interpret this as referring to the block device, not the filesystem.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

I think there is a way to add "comments" to translation strings, which then end up as comments in the .pot and then appear as ellaborated hits for translators.

I have only seen this work for the debconf templates.

I don't know of any python tools (or the right way to add source code comments) such that they get extracted into the .pot.

Also I don't know if launchpad rosetta supports showing them, or if we need to use something like weblate.org.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/pull/761