GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 573969
msgctxts aren't stable
Last modified: 2017-12-13 17:48:36 UTC
Since we currently only generate msgctxts for strings that are ambiguous (eg, "London" is a city in both England and Ontario), this means that as cities are added/removed/fixed, we may end up adding or removing msgctxts to *other* strings. This happened just now because of bug 567607, which removed Bordeaux, Wyoming, USA, causing Bordeaux, France to lose its msgctxt. I'm fixing that for now by re-adding Bordeaux, Wyoming's station to observations-2.26.txt, even though it's no longer reporting. Long term, the fix is probably to make every string in Locations.xml have a msgctxt, which will require manually fixing up the .po files to keep the existing translations from going fuzzy. (It might also be important to use shorter msgctxts in this case? We already have a unique ID for each location from our database, and we have disambiguating comments on each string, so we don't need to have the msgctxt actually act as disambiguation too.)
Given that those cases are very rare, and that adding message contexts for every one of the entries would invalidate the current translations, I'll close this bug. The current state of affairs is not something that translators have a problem with, we could always revisit if it crops up again. See https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2017-December/msg00019.html