Re: i18n work needed for gnome-backgrounds

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mån 2004-11-15 klockan 21.20 skrev Thomas Wood:
> I have proposed the gnome-backgrounds module for GNOME 2.10 (see:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-
> November/msg00162.html ),

Ok, I have added it now to the extras section of the translation status
pages for the time being. It should show up there and also work, as soon
as some of the issues are corrected.


> and would like some help on i18n work for it,
> since I don't have much experience in this area myself. 
> 
> The module is in GNOME CVS as gnome-backgrounds, so if anyone has the
> time to check over what needs to be done (in terms of i18n) then please
> let me know.

You might want to check http://www.gnome.org/~malcolm/i18n/ if you
haven't already. It contains a lot of good stuff, of which I don't even
know half of it.

I checked the po directory though, a part I'm more familiar with.
Pot files are generated files and treated as such in GNOME CVS, i.e.
they don't belong in CVS. I thus removed the existing pot file.
Translators generate the pot files themselves whenever they need it,
using 'intltool-update --pot'.

Testing this I found another problem: the contents of the POTFILES.in.
Translators need to be able to translate directly from fresh CVS
checkouts without having to do any build steps. Consequently, the
POTFILES.in must only contain files that are available in a fresh CVS
checkout, and not any generated or intermediate files. You might want to
look at the order in which the xml.in.in files get processed in order to
accomodate for that, so that the xml.in.in files can be listed in
POTFILES.in.

Furthermore, 'intltool-update --pot' in the po directory seems to be
unable to produce a pot file, which will prevent most translation
attempts. I don't know why this is so, perhaps someone more familiar
with the workings of intltool can answer that, but usually it has to do
with a GETTEXT_PACKAGE line in configure.in that intltool is unable to
understand or do its magic with.

Hope this helped at least somewhat,


Christian