Re: Please add comments to text templates

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 04:35:41PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Denis Barbier wrote:
> > Translators can hardly know how these text fragments are used and
> > displayed, a comment for all these text types will certainly be very
> > helpful.
> 
> I've added comments to all the prebaseconfig progress bar stuff.

Thanks.

> Got a question for Denis. This kind of minor change tends to create
> insanely large diffs (6000 lines for this change), and sometimes all
> that changes is some line numbers. Just adding a line to the top of a
> template throws off all the line numbers in all the po files for stuff
> furhter down. Would it be possible to make po-debconf omit the line
> numbers, or possibly use stanza numbers or template names instead, or
> would that mess up po editing tools?

I thought about removing line numbers, but they can be very useful, e.g.
podebconf-display-po takes a PO file as input, read line numbers to
re-create the original templates file and display it.  It is very useful
to check translations with special formatting.  Of course it is unable
to re-create complex templates files as those of the d-i, but it works
pretty well for normal stuff.  For this program, using stanza numbers
might be an option.
But PO editors indeed allow jumping to source files, and this will be
broken.

The ideal solution seems to be that debconf-updatepo updates line
numbers only when preparing a release, e.g. po2debconf could first
call debconf-updatepo with a specific flag, but it should ideally be
performed only once when building a package, which does not seem
trivial.  I will try harder to find a solution.

Denis