[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] po/ conflicts

[David Bruce]

Hi Brendan,

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Brendan Luchen <cheezmeister at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey David,
>
> I've been having some nasty problems with merge conflicts popping up
> in po/ in both TuxType and TuxMath, even though I haven't been
> touching those directories. It doesn't seem like any of the .po files
> are being generated, either; am I mistaken? Could you give a rundown
> of the interplay between gettext and the stuff in po/ and intl/ for
> our projects, or point me to some literature? Hoping I haven't stomped
> anything with all this merging.

Well, I think I caused some of it by adding a Mongolian po file to two
different branches in tuxmath, then trying to merge the branches,
resulting in a file with conflicts.  I've been pretty wiped out from
work the last few days, but tomorrow I should have time to get it
straightened out.  IIRC, tuxmath's "master" is OK but
"commonification" has the corrupted file.

I wasn't aware of any issues with po or gmo files in tuxtype.

Basically, intl/ is a self-contained copy of gnu libintl that contains
all the code needed for gettext to operate.  It is preferred by
distros that programs use the system's libintl rather than duplicating
code, and I think that is how it builds with autotools for linux.  The
self-contained intl/ directory is there to simplify builds for other
platforms.   If we reliably have libintl available on every platform
we want to support, we could eliminate the bundled one.

po/ is where the message catalogs for the various translations are
located.  The *.po files are the human-readable form, and the *.gmo
files are the optimized machine-readable counterparts that are
actually used at runtime.  The *.gmo files get made, IIRC, when "make
update-po" is run within the po directory.  This doesn't happen with
an ordinary "make", but does occur as part of "make dist".

To the best of my knowledge, the gettext manual has the most complete
description of this stuff.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html


HTH,

David