Hi, for a few projects I find myself needing an ability to add custom flags to messages to help manage our translation toolchain. For example:
* Some of our messages are in markdown format. I want to be able to add a flag to them so our tooling can verify a translation is still valid markdown. * We run a number of automated checks on messages to check for things like consistent use of punctuation. For some messages this is not necessary and often leads to false positives, so I would like to be able to use a flag to indicate which checks can be skipped for a message We use lingua (see https://github.com/wichert/lingua/ ) to create the pot file, which allows adding such flags in translation comments, somewhat similar to how xgettext allows format hints in comments. I would like to keep using msgmerge to sync our pot and po files; I’ve seen other re-implementations of msgmerge do bad things, and I would rather have not to reinvent that wheel. Unfortunately currently msgmerge will skip all flags it does not know about. I do understand the rationale for wanting to keep an official list of flags and filtering out unofficial ones, but for situations like ours it would be very useful if there was a way to tell msgmerge to copy our flags over to our po files. That can be either a command-line option (—keep-unofficial-flags), or require unofficial flags to be prefixed with x- . I’m happy to help implementing such a feature, but before doing so I would like to know if there is interest in such a feature. Regards, Wichert.
