[bug-gettext] [PATCH] xgettext: new option --no-linenumbers omits line numbers

[Tommy]

Hello.

We recently had the problem that line numbers in comments in our .pot 
file were causing a lot of noise in our git repository. Every time a 
source file changed, the next .pot file update would be full of changes 
to line numbers, obscuring the actual changes to translatable strings.

At the same time, the file name in the comments is very helpful for our 
translators, so if possible we would prefer not to disable location 
comments entirely.

Disabling the line number portion but leaving the file name seems like a 
very good solution. In our case, the file name almost always provides 
the necessary context to the translator, and when it doesn't it is easy 
enough to grep or text search in the indicated file to find the exact usage.

There appear to be a number of other people with the same problem, and 
the popular but unsatisfactory solution seems to be to filter "#:" 
comments out of the git-diff output. See 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2006351/gettext-po-files-under-version-control

The gettext code already handles the case where a line number is 
unavailable, so patching in an option to disable line numbers was trivial.

I used "--no-linenumbers" as the option name, because that was the first 
thing I tried.

What do you think?


-- Tommy

0001-xgettext-new-option-no-linenumbers-omits-line-number.patch
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