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

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Yesterday at 23:26, Mikael Hallendal wrote:

> 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...

Wow, Mikael, thanks for doing that!  You're my very personal hero for
the day, and I'm sure many (all?) translators appreciate your doing
that ;) 

FWIW, it's not only conflicts that I hate.  I have a dial-up line,
and imagine what's it like to have to "cvs up" eg. gnome-applets,
gimp, gnumeric or evolution module (with 50+ translations which are
4000+ strings large) that have not had any large changes apart from
them being "make dist-ed".

I've not investigated CVS behaviour in such cases, but it seems
dog-slow (yes, I have -z4 in my .cvsrc).

So, there's more than just conflicts in a case against commiting
updated PO files.

On the conflicts side, I'll add to discussion that this is not the
same as more people working on the same code in CVS: PO file gets
mangled completely (source references change, strings change, order
of the messages change), and number of conflicts is such that it is
impossible to recover them in a sane way (unlike with source code,
where you can search for conflict markers).  

For those not convinced, imagine having to resolve a conflict with
indentation and spacing changes in *entire* .c file (lets make "make
dist" run indent on all the files, with tarball-creator preferences ;).

Cheers,
Danilo