Re: shishi-0.0.30.pot file

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Simon,

Thanks for explaining.

> Right now, I keep the *.po files in CVS (or Git), and often when I make
> code changes, the *.po file changes too, modifying the line numbers.  I
> don't know whether to commit the modified files or not to cvs.
> Committing them will lead to an extremely large amount of silly commits
> to my source base in *.po, just changing line numbers.  Using
> --no-location removes most of the superfluous mofications.
> ...
> Is there some guidelines on how to use *.po with CVS?

We don't have a perfect solution so far: I am committing PO files into
CVS occasionally, whereas Paul prefers to fetch them from the TP site as
part of "autogen.sh".

> I suppose the problem is that the *.po files really are a combination of
> hand-maintained text and auto-generated material.  It would be nice to
> separate the two somehow, so that I don't have to store auto-generated
> stuff in VC.

Yes, this is exactly the problem. (It was also the hard part which kept me
away from implementing "gnulib-tool --import" for a long time, until you
came along, announced that hand-maintained files and autogenerated stuff
should be clearly separated, and then you did it, and everything was easy. :-))

> I have considered not putting *.po into VC at all, but instead having
> *.po.in or similar in VC, copied to *.po before autoreconf is run.

Can you try this patch? With this patch, and of course the removal of
--no-location from po/Makevars, the POT file will contain the line number
references, whereas the PO files in your source distribution won't.

Since the shishi project is using the TP, translators will usually fetch
the PO files from there; there the msgmerge process is done by the TP robot,
and since you will submit a POT file with line numbers, the translator will
get a PO file with line numbers. This means, the PO files in your source
distribution don't really need to contain line number references.

Bruno

*** po/Makefile.in.in.bak       2006-10-24 22:52:10.000000000 +0200
--- po/Makefile.in.in   2007-06-07 14:39:21.000000000 +0200
***************
*** 55,62 ****
  XGETTEXT_no = @XGETTEXT@
  XGETTEXT_yes = @XGETTEXT_015@
  XGETTEXT = $(XGETTEXT_$(USE_MSGCTXT))
! MSGMERGE = msgmerge
! MSGMERGE_UPDATE = @MSGMERGE@ --update
  MSGINIT = msginit
  MSGCONV = msgconv
  MSGFILTER = msgfilter
--- 55,62 ----
  XGETTEXT_no = @XGETTEXT@
  XGETTEXT_yes = @XGETTEXT_015@
  XGETTEXT = $(XGETTEXT_$(USE_MSGCTXT))
! MSGMERGE = msgmerge --no-location
! MSGMERGE_UPDATE = @MSGMERGE@ --update --no-location
  MSGINIT = msginit
  MSGCONV = msgconv
  MSGFILTER = msgfilter