[zanata-devel] Gettext header fields

[Sean Flanigan]

Dean, James,

See especially #5 below!

The GNU gettext manual has a few things to say about the key-value
fields in the header.
  http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/gettext/Header-Entry.html

In particular, these fields should come from xgettext (or more
generally, the source document, ie POT):
  Project-Id-Version
  Report-Msgid-Bugs-To
  POT-Creation-Date

and these fields are mentioned as specific to the PO file:
  PO-Revision-Date
  Last-Translator
  Language-Team
  Language
  Content-Type
  Content-Transfer-Encoding
  Plural-Forms


In the Java PO client, the POT fields mentioned above are imported into
Resource/HDocument, (along with
  MIME-Version
  Content-Type
  Content-Transfer-Encoding),
and written out as-is when generating a POT file.


When importing a PO file, we preserve
  PO-Revision-Date
  Last-Translator
  Language-Team
  Language
  Plural-Forms
  X-Generator
  <any other fields>

but not the POT fields
  Project-Id-Version
  Report-Msgid-Bugs-To
  POT-Creation-Date
  MIME-Version
  Content-Type
  Content-Transfer-Encoding


I think this importing is mostly correct, but:

1. Ideally, we should use each file's (POT or PO) declared
  MIME-Version
  Content-Type
  Content-Transfer-Encoding
when reading, to ensure we use the correct character encoding.
2. Once we've read the file, it's probably not necessary to store which
MIME-Version/Content-Type/Content-Transfer-Encoding was used.
(We currently do store it, but only for POT.)
3. We should generate reasonable values for
MIME-Version/Content-Type/Content-Transfer-Encoding when exporting PO or
POT files.
4. Important: we should *copy*
  Project-Id-Version
  Report-Msgid-Bugs-To
  POT-Creation-Date
from the template (Resource/HDocument) when generating PO files.
5. Most important: we need to test that the PO fields
  PO-Revision-Date
  Last-Translator
  Language-Team
  Language
  Plural-Forms
  X-Generator
  <minus the POT fields>
  <plus any other fields>
are preserved during a PO file's round trip through Zanata.

#1, #2 and #3 are client-side issues, but probably not high priority
since everything is probably UTF-8.  #4 is something we should handle on
the server in ResourceUtils.transferToTranslationsResourceExtensions()
if only to avoid implementing it once per client.

#5 is basically what we need to do with PO metadata right now, in sprint
22.

-- 
Sean Flanigan

Senior Software Engineer
Engineering - Internationalisation
Red Hat

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