`gettext.ngettext` parameters `msgid1` and `msgid2` are documented as `singular` and `plural`

[dscorbett]

Documentation

gettext.ngettext’s first two parameters are documented as singular and plural, but they are actually named msgid1 and msgid2. The same goes for the other functions that support plurals.

Linked PRs

• gh-140553: Mark *gettext parameters as positionaly only in documentation #140598

[StanFromIreland]

IMO they should be made positional only, and the more informative names kept. IIRC we recently did this for a module and skipped the depreciation period since this can be considered an undocumented feature. I will look more into this.

CC @tomasr8

[terryjreedy]

I agree if possible. Applies to dngettext and two 'p' variants also. There are no docstrings to consider.

[StanFromIreland]

In #136437 for os.path, this was done in two steps:

1. Marking the parameters positional-only in the docs and backporting to bugfix branches
2. Making the parameters positional-only in the code on main only

I will open a PR to complete step one, marking all of the *gettext functions/methods as having pos-only parameters for consistency.

[tomasr8]

Making the parameters positional-only in the code on main only

I don't think we can do this without a deprecation period. There seems to be quite a lot of code in the wild that uses e.g. gettext(message=message) and this would break it.