[ckan-dev] i18n: Including po and mo files in master repo

Wed Dec 8 10:22:51 UTC 2010

Hi Rufus, 

this is a discussion that we have had a few times already, but I'd like to bring it up again: in my opinion, not having translation files in the main repository doesn't work very well. I see the following problems: 

* The deployment is complicated through the need to deploy gettext files on their own, often upgrades of the system are performed without updating the translation (or vice versa). About a third of the work I have to do about community catalogue admin stuff is related to this. 
* There is no appropriate workflow on the developer side to make sure new external strings are included in the pot and po files asap. This needs to go through a different repo at the moment, which means people don't do it. 
* Once we start allowing users to select their language within a running system, this won't scale. 

To fix this, I'd again like to propose moving both the authoritative branch of .po files and .mo binary objects into the main repo. This might not be the cleanest solution, but it does help to sort out these issues. 

Cheers, 

Friedrich 

As a related issue, at least to me it is not clear when and how transifex is updated from source and this has not improved with the new version. I've now resorted to uploading the pot file periodically by hand. Maybe I'm missing something obvious - could you help me? 