Re: POTFILES.in changes

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

ons 2002-12-18 klockan 20.41 skrev Havoc Pennington:
> > I think the problem is that the maintainers traditionally haven't been
> > very good at updating their POTFILES.in or POTFILES.skip files. 
> 
> I in fact prefer that translators go ahead and update POTFILES.* for
> my modules, I figure they can do a better job than me maintaining
> those.
> 
> Maybe we need to have some of you guys such as Kenneth and Christian
> Rose that have been around forever be the maintainers of POTFILES.*,
> and then you could coordinate this kind of issue.

The problem with this is usually that it's not a trivial task for a
person not deeply involved with the module in question to have a good
idea of what should be included where.
To find files with translatable messages that are missing from both
POTFILES.in and POTFILES.skip is nowadays a trivial task thanks to
'intltool-update -M', but knowing what should go into POTFILES.in and
what should go into POTFILES.skip is a harder task. It's of course
possible to read Makefiles, but that gets tiresome pretty fast if you
have to do this for all or many modules and all the time.
And even if you spend time reading Makefiles it's not possible to
extract such information as "this file was temporarily included but will
get completely rewritten and the messages in it changed in the next
version, so translators shouldn't bother with it in the mean time" and
similar knowledge that usually only the developers of said module know
off-hand. That's why I think the module developers are usually the best
suited ones for keeping POTFILES.in and POTFILES.skip uptodate.

I don't know what can be done to make this process easier. Right now
it's very common that these files are outdated, and that's a global
problem shared across many modules. I have been going around fixing
these files when I updated the Swedish translations anyway in the past,
but I've also accidentally broken stuff in the past (Hi Jacob! :), so
nowadays I put bug reports in Bugzilla instead since it's the safer
route. But I don't run 'intltool-update -M' on a regular basis, and in
general I don't know when files are added or deleted from CVS, so I
don't think it would be an easy task to "maintain" the POTFILES.* files,
at least not without closely monitoring cvs commits done by others.

Perhaps some better alternative would be to include some sort of
'intltool-update -M' check in build scripts or tinderbox or some such
that people use to check or build at a regular basis. Perhaps that makes
remembering to update these files. I don't really know, and I must
confess I don't really know how these build scripts work. Perhaps it's a
bad idea. My point is that I'm not sure approving some people for fixing
these files solves the problem in general, since you need continous
information about the module and it's development to know what to
include and where.


Christian