[pacman-dev] [patch] extra newlines in package install reason

[Aaron Griffin]

On 1/22/07, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> I found it yesterday and the manual still confuses me. :) Is there no
> make target to update the po files? I figured automake would build one
> in, but I guess I'm wrong; I couldn't find it yesterday.

Yeah, it took me a tad to get my head around the concepts too -
perhaps it has to do with being a native en_US speaker and not having
to deal with huge amounts of translations.

Basically, xgettext finds the strings it needs (I don't know precisely
if it scans for _("foo") or not, or just grabs all strings - that's
probably in the docs somewhere), and spits them out to a file
(pacman.pot for the src/pacman/po dir).  This file is then copied to
some LANG.po and translations are added.

The _("foo") macro which is part of util.h (in src/pacman) calls
gettext with the the translation "domain", which appears to be
"pacman":
  pacman.c: bindtextdomain("pacman", "/usr/share/locale");
This just does the lookup based on the user's locale.

So.  Anytime you add a new string, change a string, or do something of
that nature, it should:
a) be surrounded by the _() macro, so it's translatable
b) need a translation, or the translation fixed.

Now, for the record, I'm not really sure about the significance of
po4a.  All I know is it's supposed to "aid in maintaining
translations" - it adds some sort of convenience layer on top, but as
I said, I don't know any other language passably enough to translate,
so have no experience with this side of things.