[Savannah-users] Re: CVS hooks on Savannah

[Yavor Doganov]

[Dropping savannah-users via BCC; please don't followup there as the
 topic is no longer relevant.]

Jan Owoc wrote:
> My specific problem is that translators use different translation
> programs (gtranslator, Poedit, Virtaal etc.) with each having
> different conventions for maximum line length in po files. This made
> tracing changes impossible - all lines appeared changed.

Ah, yes, this is a common problem.

> I found that running:
> msgfilter -i file.po -o file.po cat

Use msgcat for that; it's more efficient and safer.

> An alternative proposed by one team member is to have a computer
> check for commits (for example, once per hour) and run the above
> command on changed po files. We could then do a "cvs diff" on every
> second revision.

This is possible.  GNUmakefile.team in gnun CVS trunk has a `format'
rule which does exactly that.  So you could install a cronjob that
runs `make format' regularly and commits the result.  The bad thing is
that the repository would be still cluttered with crappy revisions.
Here it is for convenience:

# Helper target to rewrap all PO files; avoids spurious diffs when
# they get remerged by the official build.
.PHONY: format
format:
        @echo Formatting .po files with msgcat:
        @for file in $(translations); do \
          if [ `LC_ALL=C <$$file wc --max-line-length` -gt 80 ]; then \
            $(MSGCAT) -o $$file $$file && echo "  $${file#./}"; \
          fi; \
        done

> How do the other translation teams get around this?

The solution is simple: teach all translators to rewrap the .po files
before committing, along with the msgfmt check and the
--check-accelerators check (not relevant for gnu.org, of course).
There are lots of ways to do this -- M-x po-wrap in Emacs, manual
msgcat usage, `make format' if you use GNUmakefile.team (if you don't,
you should :-)), post-save hooks for editors that support them, etc.

> Does the entire team agree to use the same gettext editor?

That would be extremely drastic and could possibly lead to discomfort,
resulting in reduced productivity.