AW: Bugs in xgettext compared with msgcat

[Marc Bauer]

Hi Bruno

> Can you explain more in which situation you are and what you want to do?
> Since
> you use poEdit, I guess you are in the role of a translator, not a
> programmer?

Yes, translation is the main job, but from the programmers part I must
extract the strings from Drupal CMS - PHP files first. This is done with a
"Drupal-pot" extractor. This one extracts the translatable strings and
create one single pot's per PHP file, btw it creates a general.pot for files
with less then 10 strings. There are some Drupal modules that consists of 10
files for example. So I get for e.g. ~10 POT files from the extractor. After
this extraction step I must merge this 10 files into one big file. This one
file is the basis for ongoing translations.

You may ask why we merge - it's a development rule to have only one po file
per module and per language. The only thing I hate today is - my dualbooting
into a linux environment only for merging some files. On my SuSE I have
msgcat and so on - but I'd like to do this on my Windows :-). So I searched
and found there is xgettext that can do the msgcat job on Windows.

> Then why do you use xgettext? Do you want to emulate translation memory?
> Or why do you have many individual catalogs in the first place?

No I don't like to emulate translation memory. All I need is - merging all
the 10 files together into one big file - or better - a currently not
possible (?) way in poEdit to import the 10 single files and save all
imported strings from the 10 files into one big file [lang].po file. 


> I can make the tools good for you only if I understand how you are using
> them.

I hope this helps... i only need a replacement for msgcat that gives the
same results, while msgcat isn't available for windows at all. Xgettext
looks like doing the trick, aside of the two "minor" problems that prohibit
the use today.


Regards
Marc