[Freeciv-Dev] Re: headers in po-files

[Egbert Hinzen <egbert@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Thue wrote:

> I might as well ask - is it ok with all maintainers if I commit a technical
> patch like this? It is very easy to do, rather than having to spread it out.
> I will of course never touch the actual translations.

IMHO: No!
Exception: A patch is needed because an .po file crashes the game.

Why? Changes should be done only by people really knowing what they are
doing: I wouldn't try to change the AI Code just for fun...

Let's speak about the last patches:

(1) Do you really know which ISO every translator uses?
    I *don't* know. Maybe you know this about all of the CVS' pos,
    but are all people of a team using the same? I don't think so:
    At least in "EG-Europe" a lot of people are changing between
    ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15.

(2) Do you know about the plural forms of every language?
    And how to define them?
    I *don't* know. And: It's an *optional* (gettext manual), very new
    feature. Noone knows if it may cause any trouble. Using it, is a risk
    - and freeciv does *not* support it now nor will it do so in the
    near future. (Before (if) this ability reaches the translators, the
    programmers have to do a lot of work: Every phrase containing a number
    has to be changed...)

(3) Why change the "fuzzy" header flag?
    As I said here, it makes no difference to use it or not. S.o. didn't
    believed it and asked the main author of gettext. He said the same.
    So there is no reason to change it. But we know, not using this flag
    caused problems in the past. They maybe solved or not: There is *no*
    advantage in changing and risk in doing so.
    I ask again: Why change it?

Three "Non-translator"-patches. None of them really needed. All of them
risky. They *are* reasons to say .po files are handled by their local
maintainers only. IMHO: good reasons.

-- 
Egbert Hinzen
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