Re: po files in CVS

[Karl Eichwalder <keichwa gmx net>]

Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis delfi lt> writes:

> I see almost before any release that all po files are updated by maintainer
> at once. This is strange and unnecessary.

This isn't bad per se.  Once in a while it's needed to update/cleanup
all PO files; otherwise it will take a lot of time to do a make for big
packages (e.g., gnumeric) -- msgmerge will take too long to figure out
all the fuzzies etc.

> First, maintainer does not fix any translations. po files are altered
> by "make dist" or "make distcheck", and if maintainer commits, every
> file is uploaded to CVS and downloaded by everone, although no real
> changes were made. This generates lots of traffic which can be
> avoided. Such a diff for gnumeric/po or evolution/po can be several
> megs of amount.

Yes, generally the maintainer has to avoid to checkin the results of
'make dist'; but he's allowed to do it just before a (pre)release.

> Second, it is pain for translators. If any translator is in middle of
> module translation, and wants to update for most recent changes, most
> certainly he will need to solve hundreds of conflicts just because of
> differenent line numbers and order of strings.

Yes and no.  Just throw away the maintainer comitted file and checkin
your version; there's no need to resolve fuzzies in this case.  Of
course, you've to resolve fuzzies if your co-translators did checkin
improvements in between.

> How to avoid this? before running "make dist" or similar targets, backup
> your po/ directory, and before commiting move it back, so po files are not
> touched. If you see lots of
> M LL.po
> but you haven't changed any of them by hand, remove them and checkout from
> CVS. Thus there is only one checkout instead of commit and lots of cvs
> updates.

Yes, this is the way to go during the daily devel business; just before
the release things are a little bit different; please, see above :)

> I don't think that is hard...

Thanks for you posting.  It helps to clarify positions.  I hope it's
clear what I want to say.

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