Re: Cleaning out unused translations

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 6:01 PM Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org> wrote:
> The obsolete translations still end up in the compiled catalogues and
> increase the package/installed size. The total isn't big admittedly (in
> particular when compared to other assets like images), but the relative
> saving is quite significant (up to 50%) for those stale translations
> that haven't been updated for many years.

I must be missing something because all the changes in your MR have a
net increase of content (e.g. ar.po is
+ 1538 - 682) so I would expect the translations to actually take up
more space after the update.

> Installing message catalogues where half of the entries are never used
> seems fairly pointless as well :-)

If it’s a pointless change vs. a pointless status quo, I’ll choose the
pointless status quo (some might phrase this as “if it ain’t broke
don’t fix it”). **But** there was actually a point: translations
should never be changed by anyone but translators. I’d rather not have
any exception, even if some cases such as yours seem unharmful, to
make it easier to enforce that rule.

> (For context, the discussion in
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3049 triggered the
> MR. Although the messages he tripped over are already commented out, so
> the MR won't "fix" his issue)

That seems like they were just looking at the wrong place. There is
even less reason for them than for you to touch the po files. I left a
comment there.

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker