anyone with access to Windows (real or VM), please test...

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, "Paul-Erik Törrönen"
<poltsi at 777-team.org> wrote:
>> Hmm? Or does that "Kuukauden n. päivä" format sound really wrong to
>> people?
>
> Yes, if you really mean to say 'n. day of the month', and not eg.
> 'Maaliskuun 15. päivä', where 'Maalis' and '15' are the replacement
> strings/numbers.

No, it would end up being "Maaliskuun 15. päivä 2014", and yes,
"Maalis" and "15" are the replacement strings/numbers.

> I think the proper form is '15. Maaliskuuta 2014'

I agree, and that's what the *current* translation does. The problem
with that is that our replacements are in the order "month/day/year"
(string/number/number), and in order to get "15. Maaliskuuta" our
current translation uses positional parameters:

  "Sukellus %1$d: %3$d. %2$skuuta %4$04d"

(where that "%3$d" is "take the third argument number").

And it's those positional parameters that are (a) broken and (b) not
really traditional stdio format strings.

So in order to avoid the positional parameters, the patch changes the
ordering to be that "monthname/day/year" ordering, which is why it
would be

 "Sukellus %d: %skuun %d. päivä %04d"

which (as you can see) avoids that "2$" and "3$" crud that doesn't
work. But that means that you get

  "Maaliskuun 15. päivä 2014"

instead of

  "15. Maaliskuuta 2014"

but at least you *get* that, instead of what you see now, which is

  "$d. $skuuta $04d"

which I think we can all agree is *really* wrong.

Put another way: the optimal Finnish word order just doesn't work. Not
with the libraries that the Windows thing is built with, at least.

               Linus