Don't patch .po files (was Re: [PATCH 1 of 1] Typo fix in help)

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 00:38 +0100, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> Matt Mackall wrote, On 03/24/2009 10:06 PM:
> > Folks, please don't patch the English portion of these .po files.
> > They're autogenerated from the source.
> >
> > I've dropped the .po bits and queued the .py bits.
> >   
> 
> Trivial changes to the English text (by definition) shouldn't have any 
> influence on the translations, and do thus in no way require the 
> translators attention.
> 
> The way Greg provided the patch the translators wouldn't notice his 
> change. That was perhaps not strictly necessary, but it was very kind of 
> him. Greg just knew all the langauges "sufficiently well" to able to 
> update all translations correctly.
> 
> If you leave out his updates to the .po files then the translators will 
> get the text marked as "fuzzy" when they run msgmerge, and they will 
> have to spend time figuring out what has changed and whether the 
> translation needs to be changed and conclude that the fuzzy marking just 
> has to be removed - by re-doing Gregs patch.
> 
> So while the procedure you describe is "safe" - by letting translators 
> do the hard work no matter if it is needed or not - it doesn't have to 
> be followed strictly in situations like this. IMHO.

Actually I ended up doing the hard work because most of the patch didn't
apply because the translations had been updated between the time he sent
the patch and the time I applied it. Given that translation is often a
batch operation, these sorts of conflict will be fairly common on one
end or the other.

And again, he's editing the auto-generated portion of the file. That's
just a bad idea in general.

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