Re: Updating po files on make dist

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2003-05-23 klockan 14.14 skrev Sven Neumann:
> > There's one situation when updating po files in cvs as a result of make
> > dist is beneficial, and that is when the module has many messages and
> > many old (not recently updated) translations. Then regenerating all po
> > files and putting these back into cvs can save some substantial build
> > time for those building from cvs.
> > 
> > In practice this should rarely be needed though. Few modules have that
> > many messages and that many old translations to warrant this. The
> > example that comes to mind was that this was the case for Nautilus once,
> > and I can imagine that Evolution also occasionally needs this with its
> > more than 6000 messages. In such cases, announcing in advance to
> > gnome-i18n@gnome.org that the po files in cvs will be touched at release
> > time is appreciated.
> 
> GIMP is such a case as well. There are unfortunately quite a few
> unmaintained translations and there are lots of messages. I think that
> it is a good thing that these files get updated on 'make dist'. That
> way they don't get too far out of sync.
> 
> If translations are properly maintained, there shouldn't be any
> problems from the current 'make dist' behaviour. The changes should be
> minimal and easy to merge. If there's a conflict, the translator can
> simply go back one revision and merge his/her changes there.

The problem with this strategy is that make dist unconditionally updates
all po files, not just the ones that are unmaintained and that really
need updating. So irregardless of how well you maintain a particular po
file, you will get cvs conflicts when you update it, and cvs conflicts
that are unnecessary in every sense of the word, and needs extra steps
to resolve. That gets tiresome pretty fast.

So while that may not be the intent, unconditionally updating all po
files in cvs with make dist with every release in practice penalizes all
translators, irregardless of how well they maintain their translation. 

It also makes cvs history for those files barely usable. A common cvs
rule is to avoid committing source files passed through "indent" into
cvs, for exactly the same reasons.

One can always argue that repeatedly resolving unnecessary cvs conflicts
isn't difficult and not that big of an issue. Irregardless if you care
about it or not, it definately makes one have to spend more time doing
completely unnecessary and irrelevant stuff instead of doing what one
likes and is good at. I believe this is true for everyone, coders and
translators alike. So please respect that and keep it fun to contribute.


Thanks,
Christian