Re: obsolete entries in po files

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 07:21:23PM +0100, 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.

They are not always useless.
That depends on the kind of string and the program/project being translated.
For some strings (and some projects) chances are high that the string gets
reintroduced, or a very similar one.

Maybe a nice thing to have (but that would need to be done on gettext tools)
would be a tag to tell the date when a string got obsoleted; then tools
could have an option to delete those older than a given amount of time
(user specified); that would avoid losing translations just because someone
/* commented */ some lines temporarly to do some test then put them back,
but the translators removed the #~ old lines, and then go on holiday and
when they are back the new release hasn't some translations that the 
translator had done, then removed...
Yes, that kind of things happen, I already saw it several times.

A way to keep old strings some time (eg: 4 months) would allow sufficiently
good flexibility and possibility to retrieve strings when they are
reintroduced, still limit the growing of old strings.

> Any pro-argument for obsolete entries?  
> -- 
> kabalak / kabalak@kabalak.net / Fatih Demir
> `-GNOME / ICQ:64241161 / GSM: +491749787080
>  `-Editor / vim

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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