[Po4a-devel]Large scale po4a test report

[Martin Quinson]

Hello,

I gave po4a a try on a very large scale project: the perl documentation.
I've found an existing french translation for a bunch of them (2.2Mo of
translated material). The gettextization was a *very* bad experience. The
translations were against 6 differents versions of the source, and some
where updated from a version to another, but badly. During the update, some
parts were not translated, and so on.

It took me a while (15h) to gettextize it, but now it's done. The resulting
po file is about 5.5Mo... 

The po4a tools handle it rather fine, but I'm still in the process of
msgmerging it against the lastest pot file. It runs since 30 hours on a 1Ghz
G4 box, and it's still not done. The extraction took less than 30 sec. I
hope that it's only the first msgmerge which takes that long. If msgmerge is
programmed well, it will be the case. If not, I'm gonna bug msgmerge ;)
More to come on that.

Then, I still will have to review the po. All strings are marked fuzzy due
to the gettextization. But I hope to find people to help me with it, and
that's not a po4a issue anymore.

So, the conclusions are the following:
 - po4a can deal with very large projects in a reasonable amount of time
 - msgmerge may not scale enought for po4a
 - we may get a whole bunch of excellent perl hacker looking into po4a in
   the next months (once I propose the inclusion of this into the perl
   distribution ;).
 - I was wondering if the perl documentation was also translated into
   spanish, catalan or german (or something else). I gave a try to google,
   but my knowledge of those languages is too limited to guide google
   properly... 

Thanks, 
Mt.

-- 
Learning and doing is the true spirit of free software -- learning without
doing gets you academic sterility, and doing without learning is all too
often the way things are done in proprietary software.
          -- Raph Levien