Re: New Polish PO file for 'libc' (version 2.16-pre1)

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

> You can backport the incoming .po files to any branch which contains a
> .pot file that matches the .pot file currently used[1] by the translation
> team to generate the .po file?

Yes, that's the crux of what I meant and probably a better way to state
it.  I glossed it over with the thought that keeping track of which
branch you are working on is something that people are less likely to
get confused about than the literal requirement, which is something like
'git diff --quiet origin/master..HEAD -- po/libc.pot || do_not_do_it'.

The nature of gettext translations means it can actually be slightly
fuzzier than this, but I don't think we want to get into that.
Technically the way it works is not all-or-nothing, but on a per-msgid
basis.  That is, each msgid line in the .pot file corresponds to the
msgid line with the identical string in .po files.  If a .po file lacks
a particular msgid, then gettext ("particular") will just yield
"particular" (i.e. the original English) rather than a translation.  So
some amount of drift doesn't completely ruin the user experience, just
degrades it incrementally for the new/changed strings.  But unless the
translation teams really want to us to do otherwise, I think we should
stick with the simple rule that you only ever want to use .po files that
were made for exactly the same .pot file you currently have.


Thanks,
Roland