Re: Updating po files on make dist

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas broadpark no>]

fre, 23.05.2003 kl. 22.49 skrev Christian Rose:
> fre 2003-05-23 klockan 20.56 skrev Kjartan Maraas:
> > > We do have intltool and the translation status pages these days, so we
> > > don't need constantly regenerated files being put back into cvs. So
> > > what's the benefit?
> >
> > - the tarball matches what's tagged as the release in CVS
> 
> That is indeed a benefit, but only for formal reasons. In practice,
> there's little benefit from having an exact copy of what's in cvs in the
> particular case of po files, as there may not be even the slightest
> change in the actual translation content anyway even though the bits
> clearly differ. So the usefulness of this is debatable.
> 
Just debating here :)

> 
> > - there is a speedup on make dist for larger modules
> 
> Only noticable when there are many unmaintained translations. Also, the
> overwhelming majority of the modules in GNOME cvs do *not* belong in
> this category. They are neither big message-wise, nor do they have
> exceptionally many unmaintained translations. So this means that make
> dist is currently adopted behavior-wise to the most uncommon case, which
> clearly seems backwards, especially since the current behavior causes
> unnecessary cvs conflicts.
> 
> 
> > - obsolete strings are marked as such, removing the possibility that
> > someone translates obsolete stuff because they forget to do a msgmerge
> > with a current template before they start
> 
> If they start translating from a tarball, the stuff is most likely to
> already be obsolete anyway, and it's a lost cause in either case.
> 

We do release tarballs fairly often these days so that might not always
be the case.

> 
> > - we don't have to change change any tools
> 
> That's certainly also a strategy, but I would prefer having the problem
> fixed once and for all, instead of looking forward to spend my time with
> resolving cvs conflicts for the forseeable future. There's more
> interesting stuff I can spend my time on, including actual translating.
> 
> 
> > Even so, I don't have a very strong opinion on this issue and it's not
> > like all maintainers already commit all the changes to CVS...
> 
> No, thankfully many maintainers understand the problem and go out of
> their way to avoid committing regenerated po files into cvs. But they
> shouldn't have to go out of their way to do that, so it seems better to
> just fix the tools instead.
> 

Like I said, I'll go with whatever the majority decides is the best way
to go. I talked to Christian earlier and we agreed asking the gettext
maintainer why it's being done this way in the first place could be a
good way to understand the reasoning behind this choice better.

Cheers
Kjartan