Re: Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo (yo, ha, ig) po files

[Thomas Thurman <tthurman gnome org>]

Ysgrifennodd Marcel Telka:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 09:43:51PM -0500, Thomas Thurman wrote:
> > Maybe in future we need to make the gettext tools enforce a rule that  
> > the header block of a .po file contains licence information, instead of  
> > assuming it's okay to leave it in the comments.
>
> Then we should also enforce compiler (gcc) to add license information to
> binaries...
>
> Do we really want that?

Yes, I'd like that too.  Actually, it would be really useful to warn 
people linking non-GPL binaries against GPL libraries.

But I don't think the cases are parallel.  You can't point some tool at 
a compiled binary and get the source code back.  You can throw .mo files 
at msgunfmt and get *almost* the original .po back, but lacking the 
comments; if the comments are just comments, that's fine because they're 
just hints to humans, but if they contain actual useful metadata, 
there's no reason that metadata shouldn't live in the header block along 
with the metadata we already carry, like contact email address and name 
of the last translator.

Honestly, the only metadata that *needs* to be in the header block is 
the content encoding; everything else is for human convenience (author 
name and contact details could live in comments as licence data already 
does, date can be figured out from source control, project can be 
figured out from the place the .po or .mo file is found, language team 
can be figured out from the pathname and the project name).  There's no 
reason not to add another field to the mix to stop cases like this from 
happening again.

peace

Thomas