Re: Updating po files on make dist

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2003-05-23 klockan 20.56 skrev Kjartan Maraas:
> > We do have intltool and the translation status pages these days, so we
> > don't need constantly regenerated files being put back into cvs. So
> > what's the benefit?
>
> - the tarball matches what's tagged as the release in CVS

That is indeed a benefit, but only for formal reasons. In practice,
there's little benefit from having an exact copy of what's in cvs in the
particular case of po files, as there may not be even the slightest
change in the actual translation content anyway even though the bits
clearly differ. So the usefulness of this is debatable.


> - there is a speedup on make dist for larger modules

Only noticable when there are many unmaintained translations. Also, the
overwhelming majority of the modules in GNOME cvs do *not* belong in
this category. They are neither big message-wise, nor do they have
exceptionally many unmaintained translations. So this means that make
dist is currently adopted behavior-wise to the most uncommon case, which
clearly seems backwards, especially since the current behavior causes
unnecessary cvs conflicts.


> - obsolete strings are marked as such, removing the possibility that
> someone translates obsolete stuff because they forget to do a msgmerge
> with a current template before they start

If they start translating from a tarball, the stuff is most likely to
already be obsolete anyway, and it's a lost cause in either case.


> - we don't have to change change any tools

That's certainly also a strategy, but I would prefer having the problem
fixed once and for all, instead of looking forward to spend my time with
resolving cvs conflicts for the forseeable future. There's more
interesting stuff I can spend my time on, including actual translating.


> Even so, I don't have a very strong opinion on this issue and it's not
> like all maintainers already commit all the changes to CVS...

No, thankfully many maintainers understand the problem and go out of
their way to avoid committing regenerated po files into cvs. But they
shouldn't have to go out of their way to do that, so it seems better to
just fix the tools instead.


Christian