Re: tracking source files for POTFILES.in?

[Bruno Haible]

Karl Berry asked on bug-gnulib:
> How do people maintain the list of Gnulib source files for POTFILES.in?
> Other than simply tracking the ever-changing list of sources, is there
> any built-in support of some kind?
> 
> I can imagine writing a script that greps the gnulib dir or whatever,
> but maybe it's already been worked out?

Good point. There are two questions:
  1) How to maintain the POTFILES.in in general?
  2) How to manage the localization of source files in gnulib?


Ad 1) Currently it's a manual selection. I've been thinking about a
specification with with wildcards and an include/exclude mechanism. Something
like

  find-files --include='*.c' --include='parser.y' --exclude='parser.c' \
    > po/POTFILES.in

The drawback of this is that files lying around in the source tree that will
not be packaged by "make dist" nevertheless end up in the POT file.

An alternative is to walk all the Makefile.am's in the source tree, collecting
the *_SOURCES and discarding the BUILT_SOURCES. But it works only in projects
that use automake universally.

Opinions which one should be preferred? Or other alternatives?


Ad 2) We shouldn't ask the translators to translate the same strings
repeatedly. Some translator groups have a shared translation memory, some
don't. In the long term, I therefore think the right solution is that every
gnulib module with translatable strings comes with its own POT file and set
of PO files. There is a proposal on the table of the automake developers to
make this work.


Bruno