Would something like what has been done for Totem[0] be useful here?

Please, keep in mind that it's a workaround.

[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=793627#c13

It would work for building eog, but unfortunately not for Damned Lies. And if translators work on .po files without the strings, then it doesn’t really matter if they are extracted when building.

Seems like we need to push for fixing gettext after all. :(

This adapts the Makevars workaround we used with autoconf to meson and makes it work on eog's side (ninja eog-pot or ninja eog-update-po seem to do the right thing).

commit 956e8239723fc8bc4a043dc268e5a2a64a7a9817
Author: Felix Riemann <>
Date:   Tue Feb 20 20:44:56 2018 +0100

    po: Re-add workaround for plugin file translations
    
    gettext doesn't recognize the 'Description' key in plugin files by default
    and needs an additional commandline parameter to do so.
    
    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=793658

Regarding Damned Lies, it seems that it parses the meson.build file already: https://git.gnome.org/browse/damned-lies/tree/stats/models.py?id=99942846b8ea5cef500c99a8b2a6ae5a2dbc9b48#n840
Maybe it could extract the 'args' parameter as well. It would probably need some sort of parameter sanitation though, so that nothing bad gets executed on the server.
---
This problem has been fixed in the unstable development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain that newer version.