Re: POTFILES errors on status pages

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 6/28/07, Jorge González González <aloriel gmail com> wrote:
> El jue, 28-06-2007 a las 23:30 +0930, Clytie Siddall escribió:
> >
> > The warning icons on the l10n status pages about files missing or
> > incorrect in POTFILES puzzle me. There's nothing I, as a translator,
> > can do to fix that problem.
> There are several reasons to show warning messages, at least the ones
> that concern us are:
>
> * DOC_LINGUAS list doesn't include this language.
> * There are some missing files from POTFILES.in
>
> For the first, just to know that what it means, quite obvious.
> For the second one, you (or any other translator) should copy the names
> of the missing files into the file POTFILES.in, in a tidy way. Easy.

Or, even better, bug report it, so that developers can fix it.
There may be legitimate reasons why a source file is left out of
POTFILES.in (and really should be added to POTFILES.skip instead), but
those reasons may not be obvious to a translator. For example,
sometimes not including a file is easier than commenting out the
entire source file when a developer has second thoughts about using a
particular code path. Of course, the gettext tools don't understand
the concept of a file not being included...
Because of this, the developers of a project are usually better
informed when to decide what  source files should be included in
POTFILES.in and what should be in POTFILES.skip instead.

Furthermore, there's always an educational point about sending a
(kind) bug report before fixing the bug yourself. If other people
always fix things you broke, or forgot to do, behind the scenes
without reporting it to you, then chances are of course higher that
you'll never learn to fix or do those things yourself in the first
place.


Christian