gnulib translation handling documentation (was Re: Request for translations: man-db-2.5.1-pre1.pot)

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 12:36:38AM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hello Colin and Benno,
> > Bruno, is the scheme I outlined in the quoted text above a
> > reasonable way to handle translations of gnulib strings in a client
> > package?
> 
> Yes, absolutely.

Excellent.

> > I'm trying to avoid having to import the strings by hand or come up
> > with complicated merging schemes.
> 
> The scheme was designed not only to save the maintainers from merging
> PO files, but particularly to save translation teams from translating
> the same strings multiple times (if they don't use translation
> memory).

Right, though I didn't mention that, I was certainly conscious of it. I
don't know to what extent the use of translation memory is common, and
even then I'm not certain that corrections to translations in the gnulib
domain would reliably propagate elsewhere.

> > > > When the --po-base and --po-domain options are passed to gnulib-tool
> > > > (as I do), gettext is redefined within gnulib to call dgettext with
> > > > DEFAULT_TEXT_DOMAIN as the first argument; in this case
> > > > DEFAULT_TEXT_DOMAIN is "man-db-gnulib". The one thing that remained
> > > > in order for this to work perfectly was to add a single line to all
> > > > my main functions:
> > > >
> > > >   bindtextdomain (PACKAGE "-gnulib", LOCALEDIR);
> 
> Thanks for reminding me that this should be documented like this.
> 
> > the maintainer of gettext also appears to be
> > the one who implemented --po-base and --po-domain in gnulib-tool, and I
> > can conceive of no other use for them, particularly not the very
> > specific way in which it was done with dgettext.
> 
> The reason for the confusion is that the --po-base and --po-domain is a rather
> recent addition to gnulib-tool. It's not even fully documented yet, and 
> gettext
> itself is not yet using this option in its gnulib-tool invocations.

I decided to write some documentation for this (diff attached), which I
hope you can review and add to Gnulib. What do you think? If you require
a copyright assignment for this, I can certainly do that, though there
may be a short delay in getting a signature from my employer (I work
from home so it would have to wait until I'm in the office later this
month).

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden

gnulib.po-domain.diff
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