On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 11:25:44AM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote: > Hi, > > One issue still needs discussion within the planned po / pot file > integration [1]: > When should the PO files that are distributed be merged with the POT file?
Just a few comments from a long-time gettext+automake user which I hope might be useful: The number one problem for me (as you identified) is the huge churn in po file content as you make source changes. I'd like to suggest that the best way to tackle the problem is to simply stop generating the source file/line number comments by default; I'm already doing this in some of my projects by adding "--no-location" to XGETTEXT_OPTIONS in po/Makevars. It's a massive improvement. Making this small change has a huge impact. po file changes are now sensible: they match source string changes only, not massive line renumbering because I added/removed some unrelated code. This makes merging between branches sensible because I don't have an entire po file full of line number conflicts I can't hope to merge manually. A question I have is "what purpose does having the line number and source file serve"? Do those benefits outweigh the massive disadvantages? And if the original source file(s) for a string need to be found, grep(1) is pretty fast. At least for me, the translators get mailed the po file, and never look at the source, so it's not of *any practical benefit* to anyone AFAICS; I've certainly had no complaints since I turned them off. With this change made, I would be fully in favour of having "update-po" run by default so that the po files are always kept up-to-date. In this situation, it makes sense--the po file changes are *entirely related* to the source changes, and can be committed together. Updating the po files by default also makes releases easier: if I tag a release and then "make dist" and find all the po files were updated, modifying the repository, I need to detag, commit the changes and retag. Updating by default means the repository is always in a "releasable state" whereby any revision can be tagged without doing additional sanity checks. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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