Re: automake po / pot file integration: when to merge the PO files?

[Yavor Doganov]

At Tue, 7 Sep 2010 22:50:32 +0200,
Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Yavor Doganov wrote on Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 10:17:07AM CEST:
> > В Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:32:54 +0100, Roger Leigh написа:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > It's a massive disaster for translators.
> > 
> > > A question I have is "what purpose does having the line number
> > > and source file serve"?
> > 
> > Automatically jumping to the source.  That's invaluable.
> 
> Well, automatically jumping to a specific place in source code can
> be achieved with a more stable indexing method that file:line:
> annotations.  An example is how tags/TAGS files work: they encode a
> file name and a search regex that looks like a sed /^pattern/.

That's a nice idea, yes.  I don't know if it's easy to implement, and
I'm not sure why gettext's way is the way it is, given that *tags
predates it (IIRC, not sure).

> Now, I'm not sure reusing tags functionality exactly is possible;
> translator tools will need some adjustment to work with this.

PO editors definitely would have to be modified if this approach is
implemented in gettext proper, but I don't think that's a major
problem to be concerned about.  (They already track and adapt to
changes in gettext, naturally.)

The solution for Roger's problem (preventing .po/.pot VCS noise) is
very simple: just don't keep the .pot in the VCS; generate it at `make
dist' time.  If you keep .po files in VCS (not compulsory either; some
projects do not do this, but fetch the .po's at dist time), then
commit only those changes that are genuine translators' modifications.

Any diligent translator knows how to generate a .pot, and how to
refresh the .po from it.