Re: Translating The GIMP

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Karl Eichwalder <keichwa@gmx.net> writes:

> It isn't up to you as the program maintainer to "merge" translations
> from STABLE to HEAD or something like that.  Provide hints how
> translators might proceed, but please don't change contents of the
> files.

I have always asked people not to touch po files in CVS HEAD at all.
Until we change this rule, the po files are in the maintainers
responsibility.

Some people working on the po files don't have CVS commit access, 
so I can't simply ask them to do the conversion. Here is what needs 
to be done, so we can work out a plan how it can be done best:

(1) Some new languages have been added to the stable branch. These
    need to be added to the unstable branch.
(2) Updates to translations from the stable branch need to be 
    "merged". Merging in this context means copying the po files
    from the stable branch to unstable and running msgmerge on
    them. Since we haven't changed many strings yet, this should
    give reasonable results.
(3) We need to handle the UTF-8 problem somehow. GTK+-2.0 solved
    this by keeping UTF-8 encoded po files in the tree and I do
    like this solution but I'm open for suggestions.

> But that's not a valid reason to force the translators to deal with
> UTF-8 if they don't want to.  GTK developers think they need .mo files
> using UTF-8 (why?) convert them at installation time, please!

what benefit does this give? Converting at installation time is not
possible since we can not require the user to have the appropriate
tools installed. We could do it at release time, but this wouldn't
fit into the 'make dist' scheme. I see no real alternative to UTF-8
encoded po files in the tree.

> PO files are translators land.  Maintainers don't have the right to
> convert them into another charset.  Leave these files alone, please.

as said above, I consider po files in gimp CVS HEAD maintainers land.
Translators have been asked not to enter this area multiple times.


Salut, Sven