[pacman-dev] Question to translators : do you need the line numbers?

[Xavier]

As you probably know, in .po files, each strings also contain its actual
location in the source :
#: src/pacman/add.c:104 src/pacman/sync.c:533
#, c-format
msgid "error: %s\n"
msgstr "error: %s\n"

I guess this information can be helpful to see the context, but personally I
never used it.
And if I needed it, I would simple use grep -r "error: %s\n" (which will be
probably be less friendly, especially when po editors can use the line
information themselves).

The downsides of this however, is that for example, when we add one new
string at the top of src/pacman/sync.c, then the reference of every other
strings from src/pacman/sync.c will also be changed.
So when we need to rebuild the .pot / .po files to get the new string, we
also get a huger number of line changes. So we get both a commit huge in
size, which is not cool, but it's also harder to see what really changed.

Have a look at size of the following commit where the pacman .po / .pot files
had to be updated because of 7 messages changes:
http://projects.archlinux.org/git/?p=pacman.git;a=commitdiff;h=e8d665fbf7792ce6d8cae85d05d880fbed310b83

We can easily remove all these line numbers with the --no-location gettext
option, but the question is : Is it acceptable?