Re: Translation strings, Info welcome message

[Karl Berry]

    "Welcome to Info version 5.9.90.  Type H for help, h for tutorial." 

Sounds good to me.

    However, I was concerned about annoying translators who may have
    just translated this string.

Don't worry.  It is our job to make the strings as good as we can.  It
is the translators' job to translate them.

    Although the translation hasn't been updated, some kind of automatic
    update has matched up the old translation with the new message.

Yes, gettext does this.  It happens as part of make dist, or can be done
with make -C po update-po (see README_hacking for my terse notes).
There's rarely a reason to do it except at dist time anyway.

    However, when I try running "LANG=de_DE info" (in a UTF-8 terminal)

I've never found reliable ways of testing translations.  I believe the
underlying problem is that info will be using whatever gettext found by
configure, and that gettext won't look in our development directory.
I ended up using strace to find out what directories were being looked
at, since nothing else gave me the facts.

In my case, I have the current version of gettext installed under
/usr/local/gnu, and I did this:

  ln -s /my/devel/checkout/texinfo/po/de.gmo \
  /usr/local/gnu/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/texinfo.mo

Then when I run LC_ALL=de_DE makeinfo --help | head, the first line is
translated.  (The rest isn't, but I hope that's just because it's out of
date.)  I imagine something similar would need be to done if the system
gettext is being used.

I get no translation of the initial welcome message (or any other) in
Info.  Didn't investigate, sorry.

Setting LANG, LANGUAGE, LC_MESSAGES, has never worked right for me,
despite gettext documentation, bug reports, etc.  Only specifically
LC_ALL=ll_LL.  All quite frustrating.

    Is there any way of seeing recent updates to the translations?

I always commit new translations as soon as they are sent to TP
(translationproject.org).  So what is in the repository is current
(not counting the two that just came in a few hours ago and which I'm
about to commit).  I briefly mentioned this in README-hacking; will
write a little more.

karl