Re: RFC: remove line numbers from .po comments

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 11:25 PM, Lucian Adrian Grijincu
<lucian grijincu gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At the moment most of the content in translation commits is related to
> file position for the translatable strings.
>
> As an example: http://git.gnome.org/browse/seahorse/commit/?id=66f3c65fd7ef596062b7c7f1f127ca70e95c6a16
>
> -#: ../daemon/seahorse-daemon.c:69
> +#: ../daemon/seahorse-daemon.c:64
>  msgid "Do not run seahorse-daemon as a daemon"
>  msgstr "Nu executa seahorse-daemon ca serviciu"
>
> -#: ../daemon/seahorse-daemon.c:99
> +#: ../daemon/seahorse-daemon.c:94
>  msgid "couldn't fork process"
>  msgstr "nu s-a putut crea procesul"
>
> -#: ../daemon/seahorse-daemon.c:105
> +#: ../daemon/seahorse-daemon.c:100
>  msgid "couldn't create new process group"
>  msgstr "nu s-a putut crea un nou grup de procese"
>
>
> Endless scrolls of text with no value.
>
> The commit I'm linking to just adds a translation to one single
> string. Try and find it in there :)
>
> There are several downsides to commiting these numbers:
> 1) they make reviewing changes hard (both on l10n.gnome.org and by
> running "git diff" locally)
>
> 2) they increase the size of the repositories with useless data that
> will be carried around forever
>
> 3) they numbers are generally valid only for that specific commit.
> Once a new line is added to the source .c/.py/.etc. they become mere
> position indications. All text editors permit text search, and
> searching for the string itself will likely bring more accurate
> results than jumping to the file position.
>
>
> I'd like to know what is your opinion on using a git hook/other
> mechanism to filter these line numbers.
>

The source of the problem is that we get a standard diff instead of a
'podiff', with .po files.
In addition, I would dare to guess that it is difficult to pass such
an invasive change
which might have effects that we do not understand.

What we could do is adapt gitweb (the software at
http://git.gnome.org/) so that it has
an option to show a podiff: (difficulty: medium to high)

Another thing we could do is add a script to our 'git' installation
that does a 'podiff'.
For example, 'git podiff' which is an alias to a command that does the 'podiff'.

Simos