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

[Dan McGee]

On 1/22/07, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think if you add the option --keyword=_ to xgettext, it does what we
expect. Also, it seems like there is a file listing in POTFILES.in of
some sort, although just doing a *.c selector should work...
msgmerge allows you to update existing po files and keep the original
translations if they still apply.

> 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.
>
I think po4a is mainly for docs- e.g. the man pages.