Sorry for my intromission, but I see here some similiarities with other
translation projects (namely, KDE or GNOME).
They have already automerge features for GUI and documentation translations.
With them, the user knows already everyday which messages changed, and update
that accordingly.
Thanks to such features, it's easy for me to update translations everyday,
spending nothing more than a few minutes to translate fuzzy/new messages.
I miss that feature *a lot* on projects like this one, specially in the
documentation part.
Sometimes, minor changes on the original XML files don't mean new/fuzzy
messages, but it's something I need to check always (well, now I don't need
to do it everytime, as I have some scripts which help me), spending my time
Yes, you can fix a time, but e.g. I can not. I translate whenever I
want to, and commit whenever I want to. If I am working on something
bigger, I do not even commit every day. If my work-in-progress
translation was messed up by some useless automatic merge, I would
probably not waste my time correcting it, but instead leave the whole
translation project and do something more useful on my spare time.
In first place,
the file doesn't get corrupted. When CVS conflicts appear, the
system generates one '.<PO file>.<version #>' file with your old
contents.
You can remerge it with the new POT file to get a new, correct PO file.
In KDE-I18N-PT translation project, which I co-coordinate, such cases occur
among hundreds of PO files, but seldom; so, the benefit from an automatic
process where I only need to concern with the translation phase, does really
save my day.
I do not see a reason why this could not be done with a script, if
needed. However, I do not see the point of doing a msgmerge for all
modules just for fun anyway.
Web translation status pages seem a good example of
such use.
Certainly it should be enough if the
translator does the msgmerges *on the modules (s)he is working on*, not
all modules.
Leave that as an option on execution time.
A completely different matter, though, is to fix the status page so that
it would compare the number of translated strings to the number of
strings in the .pot file.
That doesn't count with fuzzy messages (the number of
translated is equal, but
some of them have changed and are not valid anymore).
Best regards
--
José Nuno Coelho Pires
Development Engineer
Unidade de Sistemas de Informação
INESC-INOV
Telemóvel: 96 630 61 13
E-Mail: jose.pires(a)inov.pt