Updating po files on make dist

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

ons 2003-05-21 klockan 21.49 skrev Christophe Fergeau:
> make distcheck has the unfortunate side effect of modifying all po
> files, so all translations end up being updated in cvs each time a
> module is released. These modifications of the po files don't bring
> anything (they don't add or remove translated strings, they mostly
> change line numbers in all comments in those files and stuff like that).

There's one situation when updating po files in cvs as a result of make
dist is beneficial, and that is when the module has many messages and
many old (not recently updated) translations. Then regenerating all po
files and putting these back into cvs can save some substantial build
time for those building from cvs.

In practice this should rarely be needed though. Few modules have that
many messages and that many old translations to warrant this. The
example that comes to mind was that this was the case for Nautilus once,
and I can imagine that Evolution also occasionally needs this with its
more than 6000 messages. In such cases, announcing in advance to
gnome-i18n gnome org that the po files in cvs will be touched at release
time is appreciated.

In all other cases, committing po files that were touched by make dist
is just a nuisance that most translators would want to go away as soon
as possible (see below).


> On the other hand, if a translator has a modified po file on his
> computer that he hasn't committed yet, the next time he cvs updates,
> he'll get a conflict for most of the strings in this file, which makes
> resolving the conflicts next to impossible.

This unfortunately happens quite often, and correctly resolving such
conflicts is in many cases non-trivial. And the problem is even more
worrying as most "make dist touched the po file" commits are totally
unnecessary. They also make unnecessary garbage for someone trying to
follow cvs history for a po file.


Christian