Re: Why do maintainers "sync" po files in cvs?

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

We need to commit these files if we are going to tag for releases. It
seems kind of silly to have the tag for a release be different from the
tarball. What if there is some problem and you need to go back and look
at the translations on that tag, and branch from there to do a sub-
release? Things can get out of whack easily.

Similar things often happen when developers have code lying around in
their trees and someone else commits conflicting code. I don't see this
is a real problem. CVS conflicts are painful for anyone that has to deal
with them. There is no real way around it, unless you are the only one
committing to a project. But that's less efficient.

Keeping CVS in sync seems like a better tradeoff than having it not be
because one person keeps uncommitted translations lying around in a
tree. Especially if source files get added or removed. During string
freeze, this should be much less of an issue, and during code freeze, it
should be a non-issue, since the amount of code changing, shouldn't
drastically affect the position of the strings in the source.

I've also been pondering how best to write code so that intltool will
keep POTFILES.in and such, up to date, when new files are added or
removed.

-- dobey

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 21:40 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> fre 2004-08-13 klockan 10.44 skrev Tommi Vainikainen:
> > I've noticed that some maintainers (not speaking about translators
> > now) run intltool-update for every po file and then commit those files
> > with only those autogenerated changes. I think this is bad behaviour
> > with version control.
> > 
> > Sometimes I do partially update translation, but because only
> > partially, I don't instantly commit those changes. If someone
> > "updates" po file during that, I get very annoying CVS conflicts.
> > 
> > So how to get this message (ie. not to do such things) to all those
> > maintainers and is there somewhere documented procedures for
> > maintainers regarding this issue?
> 
> It has been brought up before (see
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-May/msg00896.html), but possibly it's worth reminding developers again to avoid committing po files touched by make dist to CVS.