Re: howto get pot files

[root <root pc96 ma rhbnc ac uk>]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, zhaoway wrote:

> please how can i get pot files in a
> easy way? i want to help the zh_CN
> pot translation.

Afaik, currently you need to download (CVS) the whole source tree of
the application you need to translate and create an updated .po to check
the messages.

For example, for gnome-core

1. setenv CVSROOT ':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'
2. cvs login        (press enter for password)
3a. cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core      (if it's the first time you grab
gnome-core)
[SEVERAL MBs downloaded]
3b. cvs -z3 update -Pd gnome-core    (if you have already an older version
of gnome-core)
[SEVERAL MBs downloaded]
4. cd gnome-core/po
5. ./update.sh                       (this creates an updated
gnome-core.pot)
6. ./update.sh zh_CN	             (this creates an updated zh_CN.po,
you use this for translations)

On (6), if there is no already a zh_CN.po file, it does not work. You need
to copy gnome-core.pot to zh_CN.po, set the fields of the header and
translate.

Suppose that there was a cron application that every day went to each
gnome-PACKAGE/po/ and updated at least the gnome-PACKAGE.pot. Downloading
just gnome-PACKAGE.pot and the previous translation of zh_CN.po, you could
do the updates with just those two files.

You would then do:

(suppose you already logged on CVS)
% cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core/po/gnome-core.pot
% cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core/po/zh_CN.po
% cd gnome-core/po
% msgmerge --strict --verbose -o `date "+%d%h%y-"`zh_CN.po zh_CN.po
gnome-core.pot

In this case, you update the 11Aug2000-zh_CN.po file and submit it.

To be extra cool with the "version" field of the .po file you just
translated, you would also need to do:

% cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core/configure.in

In this file, it says the exact new version of the gnome package. (It is
not updated automatically from the update procedure).


Alternatively, the cron daemon could run the "update.sh" script for all
languages and all packages every day so that you would just need to
download one file per package, namely zh_CN.po. Even better, since the
file is then available, one could link it to
http://www.gnome.org/i18n/release/status.shtml, so that with just the
browser you could download, update and submit.


All these are nice with two gotchas:
a. You need a lot of experience to be able to translate the messages
without having access to the program/source code. Brings down quality?

b. Automatic updates could possibly make translations a moving target. 
The msgmerge program could destroy some .po files. This needs some testing
to verify.

HIH,
simos