Re: ALL_LINGUAS

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

ons 2003-01-22 klockan 16.33 skrev Keld Jørn Simonsen:
> > ########################################################################
> > When you add a new translation to a module and want the translation to
> > be used, make sure you also add the language code of the translation to
> > the ALL_LINGUAS line in the module's configure.in file. If you don't do
> > that, the translation won't get picked up by the build system, and won't
> > be used.
> > ########################################################################
> 
> WHy is this necessary? Could the configure script not just look to see
> which *.po files there are and use those? That woudl automate this
> step.

As Carlos already said, this is usually considered a feature, not a bug.
:)
 
If, for example, a maintainer close to release finds out that the
software won't build or crashes due to a bug in a translation, he or she
can just quickly disable the translation for the moment by removing the
language code from ALL_LINGUAS. Deleting the translation isn't
necessary. A person that later wants to debug and fix the problem can
then just enable the translation again to do debug the issue and fix it,
as the po file is still there.

The ALL_LINGUAS is just a more elegant way to enable/disable
translations than having to delete po files from tarballs or cvs. I
believe deleting po files is a very drastic and unfortunate step and I
think most translators will agree, but on the same time maintainers need
to be able to do quick releases (for example security fixes etc) even
though there is a bug in a translation. With ALL_LINGUAS they have a way
to disable a translation without having to delete po files.


Christian