Re: Release Notes - Info request on correct way to update .po for a language
Hi Beatrice,
Am 9. August 2025 13:03:41 MESZ schrieb Beatrice Torracca <beatricet@libero.it>:
>I can use
> make update-po LANGS=it
>to update the .po file for Italian. That also changes all the .pot files in source/locales/
>
>I always wonder if I should commit those too, and in doing so, make all other languages incomplete, but at the same time sort of activate an update for all languages.
The other languages are not getting incomplete or outdated, because you are doing the 'make update-po' call.
Indeed they were imcomplete/outdated before already - because the English original has changed (and this the only way, they are getting implete/outdated).
>Or if I should just update and commit the Italian .po files, and wonder if that will cause problem having them not corresponding to the .pot in the repository.
Yes, you can just commit your Italiano files, and leave the rest aside.
No breakage will happen because of this.
The only purpose behind the pot files is: they serve as empty templates for people starting a translation for a new language.
>I don't want to cause any prob, if anyone working on the original content can give me an advice on what to do without disrupting the workflow for English and all the other translations, I would be very grateful.
The ideal workflow would be, to call 'make update-po' for all languages (and also commit the pot files in that step as well), when English has changed (or once a day at least, or similar), and I did that in the past indeed several times.
Holger
PS: I'm a quite unhappy with the 'make update-po' functionality in Sphinx/reST. Comparing that with the old docbook-based variant it is lacking an important feature for translators: it does not add the old English text to the po files as comment (this is what docbook/po4a does via the '--previous' commandline option).
That feature allows translators easily to see what has changed in the English original text in their po editor (I use lokalize for that, for example).
I opened an issue against sphinx on github to ask for such feature, but the upsteam authors seem to think different about this:
<https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx-intl/issues/121>
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