Spec: Introduce a mini-specification for localized resource use from JSON

[DHowett-MSFT]

Summary of the Pull Request

Pursuant to #4476, we may need to localize the name of the "cmd" profile.

References

#4476

[DHowett-MSFT]

[zadjii-msft]

Largely I'm okay with this since I already basically spec'd this in #2193, but let's make sure these discussions run their course

[zadjii-msft]

Yikes I think a comment would probably be best here, I don't think we want to have to burden users with using the longer form in userDefaults. Esp. considering there's only 2 profiles in there by default, if they copy-pasta the cmd one, that might get really confusing.

[zadjii-msft]

Do we want resourceKey or just key?

[DHowett-MSFT]

+1 to key as it’s more concise

[zadjii-msft]

"name": { "key": "CmdDisplayName", "default": "cmd" }

maybe?

[DHowett-MSFT]

Not sure about having a default. Things we specify should actually assert during DEBUG that they don’t exist, because it’s very important that we land all the resource keys right. Things the user specifies that don’t exist should return something like [KEY] so they can see the error of their ways.

Either way, I’ll include it in the spec

[zadjii-msft]

oh man if only there was a spec for that
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/2193/files#diff-babe43bd5e22464667ee68636e003085R333-R355

[DHowett-MSFT]

I feel silly for having specced something you did already. I’m sorry about that. I couldn’t in truth remember if we landed on that discussion 😅

[carlos-zamora]

i18n?

[DHowett-MSFT]

Industry-accepted term for “Internationalization”

[carlos-zamora]

I'm confused by something. So I'm just going to run through a scenario and you can correct me where I'm wrong.

1. I'm in English-US locale
2. I download Terminal
3. When I open my defaults.json and settings.json, I literally see this...

"name": { "resourceKey": "CommandPromptDisplayName" }

4. To use commandline args, I need to call wt -p "Command Prompt"
5. I change my locale to Spanish-MX
6. My defaults.json and settings.json are unchanged
7. To use commandline args, I need to call wt -p "Command Prompt - Spanish Edition" (but like, with the actual localized string)

Separately, what I'm confused about is, can't we just use your %Version% code from before? Just add a %CmdName%, then replace it with a localized name? This would fail on everything past step 5, but is that an important scenario?

And we wouldn't have to worry about wt -p "<localized cmd name>" because we search through the profiles be a normal name, so that'd be ok?

[zadjii-msft]

Separately, what I'm confused about is, can't we just use your %Version% code from before? Just add a %CmdName%, then replace it with a localized name?

I really like that. If we stamp the localized string straight into settings.json when it's generated, then it'll remain static unless the user changes it. So when they change to Spanish-MX, they'd still see "Command Prompt" as the name of the profile, unless they change it manually. If they delete their settings.json at this point, we'd regenerate the file with "El Command Prompto" (or whatever).

If we go ahead with having "name": { "resourceKey": "CommandPromptDisplayName" } in defaults.json (and a one-time generated name in settings.json), and the user removes the name of the profile from their settings.json, then they might get into a weird scenario where the profile name changes when they change the locale of their machine.

Alternatively we could just leave it as "name": "cmd" in defaults.json and it would work as an effective default value 🤔

[DHowett-MSFT]

I’m more concerned about growing the manually-tended list of profile token replacements, if I’m honest. It’s fine for this one-off, but we do need a solution that’ll work for whatever other user-facing strings go in the settings file eventually. If consensus is that we should just do one more one time replacement, I’m down for that.