Re: Program version numbers and .mo files

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mån 2004-08-09 klockan 23.34 skrev Gora Mohanty:
>   I am puzzled about something. I have been trying to
> test some of our translations under CVS Gnome
> downloaded and built with jhbuild. The install
> directory is /opt/gtk2 and I have been putting .mo
> files in /opt/gtk2/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
> Things seem to work, except that some programs
> appear to need an explicit version number for the
> .mo file, e.g., gedit works when the file is named
> gedit-2.6.mo, but not if it is gedit.mo. Why is that?
> More importantly, how do I find out what is the
> correct version number? Will the value from
> "program --version" always work?

To find out the gettext domain, you can fetch the sources from CVS and
run intltool-update --pot and look at the generated pot file name.
Alternatively, you can look at the GETTEXT_PACKAGE line directly in
configure.in.


The reason some modules use a versioned gettext domain is to allow for
multiple versions of the same software to be simultaneously installed on
a system.
This is common for libraries, as some software might depend upon a newer
version of the library, and some on an older version, so both versions
need to be installed simultaneously without being in conflict with each
other, with all files being seperate, including the mo files.

However, there's usually no need for ordinary applications to be
versioned this way. As an example, I cannot figure out why anyone would
seriously need two versions of gedit installed on the same system, so in
the case of gedit it can probably be reported as a bug, as I did with
gdm (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148042).

Feel free to report such a bug against gedit:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gedit&op_sys=All&cc=menthos menthos com


Thanks,
Christian