Re: Why do maintainers "sync" po files in cvs?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 16:26, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> On fre, 2004-08-13 at 17:12 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > We need to commit these files if we are going to tag for releases. It
> > seems kind of silly to have the tag for a release be different from the
> > tarball. What if there is some problem and you need to go back and look
> > at the translations on that tag, and branch from there to do a sub-
> > release? Things can get out of whack easily.
> 
> Huh?
> 
> If you tag without checking in the updated po-files and later checkout
> that tag and run "make dist" it'll give you the same tarball as when you
> run "make dist" the first time. So nothing is really out of sync, yes
> the tarball will have a different content than the cvs tag but it will
> anyway (since the tarball includes install.sh and scripts like that
> which you don't keep in CVS).
> 
> It would be nice if "make dist" could be modified to generate the
> release po-files in a temporary place rather than in the source tree so
> that you don't have to remove all the po-files and check them out after
> though.
> 
> Personally I always (I don't think I have messed up yet) do a "cd po &&
> rm *.po && cvs up" after I've run "make dist". It's a little bit of a
> hassle but not nearly as big as it is getting conflicts...

Note that there's a chance that a translater made a commit to a po file
while you were doing make dist.  So with this approach, you could end up
tagging the wrong revision of the po file.

You could just explicitly list the files that should be committed (NEWS,
ChangeLog, configure.in), rather than just committing the whole source
tree, and then tag after that.  CVS just tags whatever revision of each
file you happen to have checked out.  Local modifications don't matter.

So commit particular files explicitly, tag, then blow away po/*.po.

It sure seems like a lot of effort that a lot of maintainers will forget
to do.  And I'll probably end up doing something stupid like forgetting
to commit one of the files.  Can't we just get make dist not to mangle
all the po files?

--
Shaun