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Re: Another load of typos



(what to do when correcting typos in debconf templates....and want to
avoid extra work to translators)

Quoting Adeodato Simó (asp16@alu.ua.es):
> * Christian Perrier [Tue, 15 Mar 2005 09:24:57 +0100]:
> 
> > Indeed, typo and spell corrections should not need translation updates
> > and affected translations can certainly be unfuzzied.....WHEN ONE
> > KNOWS HOW TO DO THIS CLEANLY...:-)
> 
>   I've never had to to such thing, but I've wondered from time to time.
>   So, if I do a spell correction in a debconf template, what should I
>   take care of doing/not doing? (RTFM welcome if accompanied by a point
>   to the relevant M :).

Nothing already written comes to my mind. The following is some of the
practice I recommend when discussing with maintainers about such
issues. This has to be followed point by point.

0) run debconf-updatepo (to be sure that ALL PO files are up-to-date
   with regards to your current templates, not yet modified for typos)

1) Put all incomplete PO files out of the way
   You can check the completeness by using:
   for i in debian/po/*po ; do msgfmt -o /dev/null --statistics $i ; done

   move all files which report either fuzzy strings
   to a temporary place. Files which report no fuzzy strings (only
   translated and untranslated) will be kept in place

2) NOW AND NOW ONLY, modify the template for the typos AND BE SURE 
   THIS DOES NOT AFFECT THE TRANSLATIONS (typos, spelling errors, 
   sometimes typographical corrections should not affect translations)

3) run debconf-updatepo
   This will fuzzy all strings you modified in translations. You can
   see this by running the above again

4) Run:
   for i in debian/po/*po ; do msgattrib --output-file=$i --clear-fuzzy $i ; done

5) move back files you moved in 1) to debian/po

6) run debconf-updatepo again

Doing so, you unfuzzy in 4 all strings fuzzied by the changes in
2+3. Moving incomplete files elsewhere prevents you to clear the fuzzy
marker they could have for *legitimate* reasons.

Again and again, only do this when you have carefully checked that
translations have no reason to be impacted by the change(s) you plan
to make. And, do this exactly as I described, in the same order.

Messing up with translations is *not* recommended. Doing so
with the gettext tools prevents to mess up encodings (emacs can be
very good at this as well as several text editors)....but you have to
be sure of what you're doing, indeed....:)


There are other ways, more elaborated, to do preventive modification
of PO files (for instance by using sed)....which allow the
"unfuzzyfication" process to be done even on incomplete files....but
this is gory enough for being left to people who *really* are sure of
what they do...:-)




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