Re: [fetchmail-devel] running make dist changes po/*.po files

[Matthias A. <ma...@dt...>]

Graham Wilson <gr...@mk...> writes:

> Running make dist change po/*.po files. Should the changes be committed
> to the tree? If not, why are the files changed in the first place?

As far as I see it, the common cause for *.po files being a moving
target for version control is:

1. we change some code in a source file, possibly inserting or removing
   a line, at any rate changing line numbers of
   strings-to-be-translated.

2. fetchmail.pot is updated automatically by make and has new line
   numbers for the same old strings

3. make dist or make install run "make update-po", which then propagates
   the new line numbers.

This must be one of the reasons gettext still deserves a 0.X version number.

I haven't yet checked if we can disable line numbers and what that would
mean for gettext or helper tools such as Emacs' po-mode.

I have only committed .po changes if I'd changed the po files' content
at the same time, usually that means de.po and sometimes fr.po.

We'll do a pre-release tarball for the translation teams a week or two
before the actual release of 6.2.6 or 6.3.0, and we'll also ask them to
report pluaral form errors or shortcomings.
  gettext has proper support for proper plural form translations, but ESR
didn't use it anywhere. Perhaps his gettext version didn't support that
at its time.

-- 
Matthias Andree