From: root To: zhaoway Cc: gnome-i18n@gnome.org Subject: Re: howto get pot files On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, zhaoway wrote: > please how can i get pot files in a > easy way? i want to help the zh_CN > pot translation. Afaik, currently you need to download (CVS) the whole source tree of the application you need to translate and create an updated .po to check the messages. For example, for gnome-core 1. setenv CVSROOT ':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome' 2. cvs login (press enter for password) 3a. cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core (if it's the first time you grab gnome-core) [SEVERAL MBs downloaded] 3b. cvs -z3 update -Pd gnome-core (if you have already an older version of gnome-core) [SEVERAL MBs downloaded] 4. cd gnome-core/po 5. ./update.sh (this creates an updated gnome-core.pot) 6. ./update.sh zh_CN (this creates an updated zh_CN.po, you use this for translations) On (6), if there is no already a zh_CN.po file, it does not work. You need to copy gnome-core.pot to zh_CN.po, set the fields of the header and translate. Suppose that there was a cron application that every day went to each gnome-PACKAGE/po/ and updated at least the gnome-PACKAGE.pot. Downloading just gnome-PACKAGE.pot and the previous translation of zh_CN.po, you could do the updates with just those two files. You would then do: (suppose you already logged on CVS) % cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core/po/gnome-core.pot % cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core/po/zh_CN.po % cd gnome-core/po % msgmerge --strict --verbose -o `date "+%d%h%y-"`zh_CN.po zh_CN.po gnome-core.pot In this case, you update the 11Aug2000-zh_CN.po file and submit it. To be extra cool with the "version" field of the .po file you just translated, you would also need to do: % cvs -z3 checkout gnome-core/configure.in In this file, it says the exact new version of the gnome package. (It is not updated automatically from the update procedure). Alternatively, the cron daemon could run the "update.sh" script for all languages and all packages every day so that you would just need to download one file per package, namely zh_CN.po. Even better, since the file is then available, one could link it to http://www.gnome.org/i18n/release/status.shtml, so that with just the browser you could download, update and submit. All these are nice with two gotchas: a. You need a lot of experience to be able to translate the messages without having access to the program/source code. Brings down quality? b. Automatic updates could possibly make translations a moving target. The msgmerge program could destroy some .po files. This needs some testing to verify. HIH, simos _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n