GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 531892
.po and .pot generation is not done at 'make dist' time anymore
Last modified: 2008-05-11 13:07:07 UTC
Please describe the problem: In Makefile.in.in the 'dist distdir' rule does not depend on update-po anymore. Steps to reproduce: 1. intltoolize your package 2. type make dist Actual results: Your archive does not contain .po and .pot files. Expected results: Your archive used to contain .po and .pot files. Does this happen every time? Yep. Other information:
This is intentional. Translators and developers both consistently requested to not run update-po at dist time. The po files ARE in the archive. They may, however, be out of date, as translators may have not updated them. This is not a bug.
Hi, Let's compare the releases that the build system generates with bare gettext, and with intltool: - with gettext, on "make dist": * "update-po" refreshes the .po files (describe the translation state accurately), * "update-po" generates .pot file (which is not in VCS, as it is a generated file) * "update-gmo" pregenerates .gmo files (so the end user does not need gettext installed, nor regenerating these files at compile time) - with intltool, these 3 points are not done; in particular the release doesn't contain .gmo and .pot files I didn't see this documented. Did I miss something? Why did some translators and developers request not to run update-po at dist time?
It breaks builddir != srcdir. It means translations can get broken at dist timel It means that every time someone does do "make dist" they will have to re-commit all of po/*.po again, or end up with SVN/CVS/whatever being out of sync with the released tarball. And people were keeping the .pot file in source control, because of the behavior of the build. Changing it to what it is currently helped promote people to not include it. And update-po does not accurately describe the translation state. It may cause perfectly already valid strings to become fuzzy, thus breaking translation state, at the very last second. Just because gettext does something, doesn't mean it does something right. And intltool is not gettext. It is a wrapper to make some maintenance tasks easier. Again, this is NOT A BUG. It is intended behavior and has been so for 3.5 years now.