Need advice regarding gettext 0.15

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Hello.

In order not to repeat sarge mistakes, I have a simple question for
the release managers: Am I in time to upload gettext 0.15?

This is the upstream NEWS file:

=======================================================================

Version 0.15 - July 2006

* GUI program support:
  - PO files can now contain messages constrained to a certain context.
    Most often such a context is a menu, dialog or panel identification.
    The syntax in the PO file is
      msgctxt "context"
      msgid "original"
      msgstr "translation"
  - The xgettext program can be told through the --keyword flag which
    function/macro argument has the role of a context.  It also supports
    the GNOME glib convention to specify the context and original string
    in the same string literal: "context|original".
  - The (non-public) include file gettext.h defines macros pgettext, dpgettext
    etc. that take a context argument.
  For more information, see the node "Contexts" in the manual.

* msgfmt's format string checking is now stricter in the presence of plural
  forms.  For example, in German, with  nplurals=2  and  plural=(n != 1),
  the translation

     #, c-format
     msgid "%d fatal error"
     msgid_plural "%d fatal errors"
     msgstr[0] "ein fataler Fehler"
     msgstr[1] "fatale Fehler"

  was earlier considered valid and now gives an error when "msgfmt --check"
  is used:
    "number of format specifications in 'msgid' and 'msgstr[1]' does not match"

* msggrep has a new option -v/--invert-match that acts like grep's -v option.

* msggrep has a new option -X/--extracted-comment that allows to search for a
  pattern in the extracted comments.

* xgettext's --keyword option now allows to specify an extracted comment on the
  command line, rather than in program's source code.

* msgmerge is much faster now, when using a large compendium.

* A new program recode-sr-latin is provided, that converts Serbian text from
  the Cyrillic script to the Latin script.
  The command "msgfilter recode-sr-latin" can be used to convert a Serbian
  Cyrillic PO file (sr.po) to a Serbian Latin PO file (sr@latin.po).

* Programming languages support:

  - C++ with Boost:
    xgettext has a new option --boost that triggers the recognition and marking
    of boost::format strings.

  - Python:
    xgettext now recognizes the source encoding from a "coding:" comment
    among the first two lines.  The default encoding is now ASCII, no longer
    ISO-8859-1.

* libgettextpo library:
  - The error handler type passed to po_file_read(), po_file_write(),
    po_message_check_format() has changed.
    This is an incompatible change: Programs using the library *must* update
    their code.
    Binary compatibility is guaranteed, however.

* The 'mkinstalldirs' shell script is no longer needed and no longer installed
  by gettextize.

* Portability:
  - Building on mingw is now supported.
  - Building shared libraries (--enable-shared) on Cygwin and mingw is now
    supported.

* Interoperability with expat version 2.0.0.

* Documentation:
  A complete example showing the use of GNU gettext with the wxWidgets GUI
  toolkit has been added.

=======================================================================

I see a lot of improvements here and there, but also several dangerous
things. However, I don't know how much "dangerous" they are:

* msgfmt is now more strict. This is potentially dangerous, but maybe it's not
after all for packages which do msgmerge at build time (debconf et al), as
the wrong strings would be treated as fuzzy translations anyway.

* libgettextpo library. I believe this definitely not to be dangerous,
as there is not a single package in sid which depends on libgettextpo0.


My opinion is that this release is not particularly risky (looking at
gnu.utils.bug I only see a problem in xgettext, which would be fixed
in Debian anyway, as there is a patch), but I would like the opinion
of the release managers.

Thanks.