Comment 2 for bug 621723

%(foo)s must die. It's a horrible ui and consistently trips up translators. However, gettext and Launchpad do not yet support the other better formats, so it's reasonable to change these back to %s format for now, because without the content checking that gettext does, the worse effect will be broken ui.

David's agreed on IRC to file an upstream gettext bug to support PEP 292 and 3101 style string substitutions. We'll defer this bug until upstream and LP support the newer formats.