[bug-gettext] msgmerge --update reordering comments

[e est]

Hi,

For our project, we are using msgmerge --update with the --sort-by-file option 
to update the language po files from the pot file generated by xgettext. Now 
the po files have comments like:

#~ msgid "Password"
#~ msgstr "Parool"

which contain msgids not used anymore. The problem we now have is that every 
time we run msgmerge, it will reorder all these commented out msgid-msgstr 
pairs. This generates a hugely bloated diff. Because of this, we run 
xgettext+msgmerge very rarely over our project, because we'd like to keep the 
git repo size small. But that doesn't help our translators, because they would 
like to translate the texts very shortly after they got introduced in the 
codebase. Therefore, we would like to run xgettext+msgmerge more often, but 
with hopefully avoiding to bloat the git repo.

I can partially work around the problem by filtering the patch for lines 
starting with #~, but that would mean the list of commented out translations 
can't grow, which is sad, and it also eliminates the actual purpose of the #~ 
lines.

I haven't tested whether the --sort-output param solved this problem, but I 
would prefer to not use it, in order to keep msgids with a similar context 
together.

Can msgmerge somehow be made "stable", in the sense that it doesn't reorder 
these commented out translation pairs?

I'm using msgmerge version 0.19.2.

Thank you.

est31