[Freeipa-devel] Please do not edit po files, please watch for this in patch review

[John Dennis]

While investigating issues with our translations I discovered a git 
commit in which some of the po files in install/po were directly edited. 
Please do not edit the po files, for all practical purposes you should 
consider them machine generated.

Patch reviewers should watch for po edits. The only time po files should 
appear in a git commit is after pulling new po files from Transifex [1]

Details:

po files are essentially a set of pairs <msgid, msgstr> where msgid is 
the raw untranslated string extracted from our source code and the 
msgstr is the translated version of that string. msgid's are collected 
from our sources via a process called "extraction" (e.g. xgettext) and 
are placed in a pot file (i.e. po template). msgid's arrive in a po file 
by a process called "message merging" whereby the msgid's in the pot 
file are merged into a po file.

If you directly edit msgid's in a po file you will have broken the 
automated workflow and will likely have caused the language translation 
to be incorrect.

If you are a native speaker and discover a problem with a language 
specific translation (i.e. you want to update the msgstr in the po file) 
then that should be done in Transifex and the resulting po file pulled 
from Transifex with the correction.

Thanks!!

John

1. We currently have a make target called "update-po" which merges 
changes from an updated pot file into each po file. We used to perform 
this step after updating the pot file but the current Transifex workflow 
obviates the need for this and is potentially problematic. As such it 
may be removed to prevent "accidents".


-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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