Re: [PATCH] PRItime: wrap PRItime for better l10n compatibility

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2017, 21:54 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwp6yes44.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <2421d5f3-12ee-833b-72d8-de627fbfe26c@scantech.fr>

Jean-Noël AVILA <jean-noel.avila@scantech.fr> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Le 22/07/2017 à 02:43, Jiang Xin a écrit :
>>
>> Benefit of using the tweak version of gettext:
>>
>> 1. `make pot` can be run in a tar extract directory (without git controlled).
>
> This issue is real for packet maintainers who can patch the original
> source and run their own set of utilities outside of a git repo. This
> can be possible with Junio's proposition by writing the files to a
> temporary directory before running the xgettext, then removing the
> temporary directory.
>
> Please note that with respect to this issue, the patched xgettext
> approach is completely disruptive.

OK, so what you are saying is that my assumption that Jiang (at least for now, and his successor l10n coordinator in sometime in the future) would be the only one who needs to have access to the machinery to update po/git.pot and that it does not matter that much what that exact machinery is as long as the resulting po/git.pot lists messages with %<PRIuMAX> and other known ones because plain vanilla tools will grok such po/git.pot file just fine, were both too optimistic.

I think binary packagers, who update the software with their own changes, produce their own modified po/git.pot and have that translated into multiple languages, are capable of coping with any method we use ourselves, but being capable of doing something and being happy to do that thing are two different things, and we need to aim for the latter---we should not make things unnecessarily cumbersome for them.

So I'll leave the s/PRItime/PRIuMAX/ patch in the 'master' without Jiang's change for 2.14-rc1. The approach to require private edition of xgettext, while it may technically be a fun exercise, would not fly very well in the real world.

For those who want to work with a tarball extract without being in a Git repository, it would be sufficient fot them to run "git init && git commit --allow-empty -m import" immediately after extracting the tarball, even if we require that "make pot" must be run in a clean repository. And I'd prefer to go that route than copying into a temporary directory, primarily because I do not want to having to worry about what to copy---when we know we pass $foo.c through xgettext, we know we want to put the modified copy of $foo.c in the temporary, but I do not want to even think if we need to also copy the header files $foo.c "#include"s, for example.

Thanks.