po files in CVS

[Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis delfi lt>]

This mail is intended for maintainers.

I see almost before any release that all po files are updated by maintainer
at once. This is strange and unnecessary.

First, maintainer does not fix any translations. po files are altered by
"make dist" or "make distcheck", and if maintainer commits, every file is
uploaded to CVS and downloaded by everone, although no real changes were
made. This generates lots of traffic which can be avoided. Such a diff for
gnumeric/po or evolution/po can be several megs of amount.

Second, it is pain for translators. If any translator is in middle of module
translation, and wants to update for most recent changes, most certainly he
will need to solve hundreds of conflicts just because of differenent line
numbers and order of strings.

How to avoid this? before running "make dist" or similar targets, backup
your po/ directory, and before commiting move it back, so po files are not
touched. If you see lots of
M LL.po
but you haven't changed any of them by hand, remove them and checkout from
CVS. Thus there is only one checkout instead of commit and lots of cvs
updates.

I don't think that is hard...

-- 
Gediminas Paulauskas  ···  http://03bar.ktu.lt/~menesis/  ···  ICQ 24859336