String freeze is coming, please check POTFILES.in and POTFILES.skip

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

According to dotplan, February 18th is string freeze day.

The usual interpretation of string freeze is "no more added localizable
strings and no changed localizable strings". This is so that translators
are given time to make translations complete.

However, it's not uncommon that software are discovered to be "missing
some translations" in the applications very late in the release cycle
and long after string freeze, and in many of these cases it's due to
files with localizable strings being accidentally left out of the
module's POTFILES.in file. When these missing files are added to
POTFILES.in, this breaks the string freeze because suddenly a lot of new
messages are to be translated by the translators.

In order to prevent this, it would be great if module maintainers and
hackers could check their modules for files missing from POTFILES.
The best way to do this is by getting the most recent version of
intltool and doing a

  intltool-update -M

in the module's po directory. Intltool will then check for files with
localizable strings that are left out of POTFILES.in or (if present)
POTFILES.skip.

If there are missing files with contents that should be translated,
please add them to POTFILES.in.

If there are files that should not be translated (they are not included
in the tarball or other reasons), please add them to a POTFILES.skip
file in the po directory, so that "intltool-update -M" can correctly
ignore these files.


Thanks everyone for your help!

Christian