Re: Some hints and guidelines for the .po file headers

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2004-07-22 klockan 15.29 skrev Stephen Holmes:
> Could not the same thing be said for the CVS history?

Yes, but not all translators have CVS accounts, so they need other
people committing for them. Thus, the CVS history is not a reliable
source for determinating what individual is maintaining the actual
translatable content of a po file.

Also, there are occasions where it's useful to know who maintains a
translation even though the file is not in CVS, but rather distributed
by other means later in the chain. Our translations end up getting
packaged into source code tarballs, and so it's not optimal to rely on
information that's only present in CVS.
This is AFAIK also a big reason why we use ChangeLog files, instead of
just CVS commit comments, apart from ChangeLogs being easier to read.
The ChangeLogs end up in the tarballs, whereas the CVS commit comments
do not.


> I have also seen the Last-Translator used as a basis for creating the
> "Credits" content for Help/About dialogues.

Could be used that way, but often one does want to give credit to past
contributors aswell. Then the Last-Translator field doesn't suffice, as
it by definition can and should only list one individual.

The list of past and present contributors in the free-form part of the
po file header should have this information, but it's difficult to
parse.

So that's why we have the special "translator-credits" messages in many
modules. With this, the translators can add as many names as they like,
each on a new line, and it's still very easy for the software developers
to automatically parse and show in an About dialog.


Christian