msgmerge and the handling of obsolete entries (Re: Updating pofiles on make dist)

[Karl Eichwalder <keichwa gmx net>]

Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> writes:

> I was expecting that the fuzzy merger would do a better job when being
> run frequently. I am not sure since I didn't do any tests but I would
> expect more helpful fuzzy matches if the po file is synced with the
> changes from time to time.

The problem is: sync'ing will produce many a lot fuzzy messages and
msgmerge will never try to assign a better matching translation to such
a fuzzy marked message.  This makes it difficult for the translator to
make use of an own catalog file (AKA translation memory).

Also morphing of obsolete, but valid translations can happen; once a
obsolete message is used for a (fuzzy) match it will go away from the
.po file silently:

ke@tux:/tmp> cat test.de.po
#~ msgid "the message 'foo'"
#~ msgstr "die Meldung 'foo'"

ke@tux:/tmp> cat test.pot
msgid "the message"
msgstr ""

ke@tux:/tmp> msgmerge -o - test.de.po test.pot 
.. done.
#, fuzzy
msgid "the message"
msgstr "die Meldung 'foo'"

Bug or feature, I don't know ;)  I'm incline to believe 'msgmerge' must
not throw away any obsolete entry.  I guess this is more an academic
problem than something that hurts in real life.

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