[bug #65858] msgfmt -c doesn't detect broken format specifiers in translations

[Bruno Haible]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #65858 (group gettext):

msgfmt does as documented in
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/msgfmt-Invocation.html#Input-file-interpretation-1
:
"If the string represents a format string used in a printf-like function both
strings should have the same number of ‘%’ format specifiers, with
matching types."

The types need to match because in general, it makes no sense to feed to, say,
an integer-consuming directive a string, or vice versa. This is true for all
programming languages. In C, additionally, this would cause a crash at
runtime, and the use of 'msgfmt -c' prevents that crash.

We leave to the translator the freedom to use a different format directive,
because that is useful in some contexts. For example, when formatting columns
of a table, in English a column might be 6 characters wide, whereas in another
language the translator might choose to allocate 10 units of width to it.


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