[PyQt] pyuic ignores translation comments

[Sebastian Wiesner]

Hello,

the C++ "uic" extracts the value of the "comment" of "string"
properties in UI files, and uses it as third argument "disambiguation"
in the generated C++ code.  However, in PyQt 4.8.2 "pyuic" and
"uic.loadUi" apparently ignore this attribute, and instead to always
pass "None" for this third argument.  According to the documentation
of "QCoreApplication.translate()" this argument is used to
disambiguate identical messages used in different contexts, so I
guess, that this behaviour actually introduces translation bugs, if a
single object contains two identical messages with different context.

It certainly leads to translation bugs in PyKDE, which uses gettext
instead of Qt's message format.  The standard KDE gettext toolchain
extracts the contents of the "comment" attribute and uses them as
message context ("msgctxt" field in gettext catalog files).  Now
gettext considers two identical messages with different contexts as
two different messages, and even more, it identifies messages through
the context and the message id.  So if a message has a context
attached, the context *must* also be given, when loading the
translation in the source code.  For instance, given a message "foo"
with context "bar", the message *must* be loaded using "i18nc("bar",
"foo")" (i18nc is the KDE function to load a message with context,
where the context is the first argument).  If just "i18n("foo")" is
used, the translation is *not* found (i18n is the KDE function to load
a message without context).

As uic now simply ignores this contexts, all messages in UI files,
which have a "comment" attached, are incorrectly loaded in KDE
applications, and consequently it can happen, that large parts of the
user interface file simply remain untranslated.  I hit this bug in my
program "synaptiks", and was forced to dig into the uic code and write
a workaround [1], which modifies "uic" in such a way, that it respects
the comments.  Concerning the implementation, "tr2i18n" is nothing
special.  The line "return tr2i18n(text, comment)" could be replaced
with "QtGui.QApplication.translate(self.uiname, text, comment.
QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)", I'm just using "tr2i18n", because it
is shorter, and because it is the function, KDE uses in compiled UI
files.

I consider this a bug in PyQt4.uic and I'd like to see it fixed.  Any
other comments?

[1] https://github.com/lunaryorn/synaptiks/blob/master/synaptiks/kde/uic.py