l10n approach for bzr

[Mark Hammond]

> On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 15:56 -0500, Mark Hammond wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > > So fairly long winded, but my view is that we should use English 
> > > strings for the message ids, and that when the locale is 
> English we 
> > > shouldn't need any translating. Which means that when strings are 
> > > cleaned up, they will get new message ids.
> > 
> > From a practical POV, when someone makes a change to the English 
> > version of a string, should we ask them to locate that 
> string in *all* 
> > translations and remove them, to make it clear the 
> translation is no 
> > longer used?
> 
> No. Launchpad translations for the win. Previously known as 
> rosetta, this was the first part of launchpad to be take out 
> of beta, and is very capable of handling this.
> 
> In gettext you have a single master concordance of strings, 
> and whent hat is update the change is propogated to the 
> language specific translations.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what that means.  You mean that I can
freely change any literal string in the sourcecode and take no further
action, and launchpad will magically ensure the "right-thing" (tm) happens
with existing translations?  If so, that is wonderful and I don't even need
to know what magic makes that work.  If that isn't quite correct, I clearly
need further education...

Thanks,

Mark