Re: obsolete entries in po files

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Fatih Demir wrote:
> Are the obsolete entries in po files meant to be kept?
> 
> gtranslator has got now such an option but I'm asking myself if
>  it's useful at all. Merging such po files takes more time etc.
>   and these messages are useless.
> 
> Any pro-argument for obsolete entries?

It depends on the module that is translated. If it is frequently updated
and source added/removed frequently, keeping "obsolete" entries is
useful.
Making the translation software automatically remove all obsolete
entries is IMHO a very bad thing to do. It should be left optional.

Nautilus is a good example. I often ended up updating the sv.po in
nautilus several times a day because it also changed very often. Source
files with translateable strings were added, removed, and changed all
the time, making the messages change in a similar pace. Often source
files were temporarily removed if it contained code that would break
nautilus' build system, tinderbox, and only added again when the source
was fixed.

The result was that often a large set of messages was added, only to be
removed a couple of hours later, and then at a later point added again.
My policy was to keep the translation at 100% all the time, but once I
made the mistake to also delete all the entries that had become obsolete
since my last update. That was a *bad* mistake. What happened in my next
update? Of course this source file was added for translation again, and
all my previous translations for these messages were lost... It was
about ~50 affected messages... After I had played around with some cvs
revision history and advanced forms of merging for some time I realized
that it would be faster if I just translated them all over again. =(

Since then I've only removed "obsolete" messages from nautilus sv.po
that I was absolutely, convincedly 200% sure they would not come back
again and hunt me.

So, keeping these "obsolete" entries is IMHO a good advise for highly
dynamic projects/modules. They're also good for fuzzy matching in such
modules. I only recently removed all obsolete entries from sv.po in the
nautilus-1 branch since that branch is now basically frozen in stone;
string changes are highly unlikely, and also build times were becoming a
problem.


Christian