Re: other/2857: i18n, translations does not work

[Dennis Bjorklund <db@zigo.dhs.org>]

The following reply was made to PR other/2857; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Dennis Bjorklund <db@zigo.dhs.org>
To: Zack Weinberg <zackw@Stanford.EDU>
Cc: Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>, Philipp Thomas <pthomas@suse.de>,
        <Gabriel.Dos-Reis@cmla.ens-cachan.fr>, <gcc-gnats@gcc.gnu.org>,
        <gcc-bugs@gcc.gnu.org>, <gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org>
Subject: Re: other/2857: i18n, translations does not work
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 09:46:08 +0200 (CEST)

 On Thu, 24 May 2001, Zack Weinberg wrote:
 
 > On the other hand, it might be more useful to have a known place to
 > work from, which would argue for leaving gcc.pot in CVS and updating
 > it periodically.
 
 But you dont ever want to have a known place to start from that is not up
 to date. Then you would just translate strings that would never be used
 anyway since they are removed or change in the source (but still in the
 gcc.pot since it's old). You always want to update your .po file when you
 start translate.
 
 And you can not have some automatic update of the .po file, since they are
 checked out by the translator and if it's updated while he is translating
 then there will be a conflict when he tries to commit his changes. So you
 don't want to update during translation.
 
 All other projects I've seen keep the .pot file out of the cvs and lets
 the translators update their .po files themself.
 
 I also think the fsf way of having a central place where you put .pot
 files to translate is broken for big programs. Translations needs to be
 tested and there is usually a lot of errors in the code that one finds
 first when one do translations. The last week Zach found 1000 more strings
 that where not marked for translation before. And there are a lot of
 constructs in gcc where the output string is created dynamically in gcc
 that only works in english. You don't see the problem until you start to
 work on it. And to wait until a release and to put a .pot file on the fsf
 ftp site and hope it will work is too much to hope for (at least for big
 programs like gcc). Also remember that a gcc translation is a 400k file
 with almost 4000 strings to translate.
 
 I don't see why the .po files should be treated any different then other
 source files. They need to be updated incrementally, and for that cvs is
 usefull.
 
 -- 
 /Dennis