Re: Sorting POTFILES.in/skip (was: Evolution-xmltv)

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

Op Wo, 2011-08-24 om 18:21 +0200 skryf Christian Rose:
> 2011/8/24 Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag gmail com>:
> > 2011/8/24 F Wolff <friedel translate org za>:
> >> Is there a policy on this?
> >
> > Not that I know of. It seems to me that this is an expected behavior
> > though, since most POTFILES.in have this in the header:
> >
> > # Please keep this list in alphabetic order.
> 
> Not a formal policy, just a convenience. In the early days when every
> maintainer used their own arrangement of POTFILES.in, or just added
> stuff at the end as things went on, accidental omissions in the file
> list were difficult to spot visually. And omissions and stray
> inclusions were unfortunately the norm... Keeping the lists sorted
> makes it easier to visually spot omissions and stray inclusions.

I guess these days it is easiest to see omissions with Damned Lies (if
not with before commits with  intltool-update --maintain).

> What is the problem you are trying to fix?

I think I frequently see things like the gconf schema strings close to
the top of files. I think I have also seen the libegg boilerplate
strings at the top. With libegg going away and the reduced files easily
available from Damned Lies, it will affect less people, but the idea is
still that the order can slightly enhance/hinder the translation
process. Ideally the .desktop file comes first with the application name
and description, for example. In the Virtaal project we put the stuff
for the command line help text at the bottom of POTFILES.in.

This is not a major issue, and I won't campaign for it. I was just
wondering if there is actually a rule that would prohibit someone from
listing things in an order they feel were more useful and if we can
improve things by thinking about how we do this.

Friedel

--
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http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/virtaal-070-released