serverguide.pot file and .po files

[Doug Smythies]

Hi Matt, and thanks very very much for your reply.

On 2013.03.26 06:36, Matthew East wrote:
> What I would suggest is that you take a look at these pages, and see if they help you understand the process:

> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Translation
> https://help.launchpad.net/Translations

Yes, I have looked at them, many times. Some of my extracted quotes were from the wiki page.

> but ultimately if you are interested in getting up to speed on how translations are generated and imported, there will be very little substitute for reading the scripts and learning about how they work.

I have been doing that also. However, it is easy to get lost in the detail and lose site of trying to make progress towards the pending string freeze.

> However when there is a new pot template in Launchpad, Launchpad updates the po files automatically so that any new strings in the pot template show as new strings to be translated.

Not that I have been able to determine or observe. I must still be missing something. And I suspect the issue might be that I refer to a .po file as the file I get when I issue a bzr branch lp:serverguide command , not some .po file that would be anywhere else in the chain of events.

> Then, as I noted above, Launchpad automatically updates the po files.

Again, not that I been able to determine or observe.

>> For this line from the example commit [1]: "Import translations from LP"
>> How does one do it?

> Hopefully the pages I've linked to will answer this.

No, it remains unclear to me (Instructions might be right in front of me and I am just not seeing it).
However, I did find some (maybe) useful information in bug 922251, from which I am now thinking:

Create a working branch ( bzr branch lp:serverguide/precise precise_po_update )
For each language (say variable=LN){
   Go to https://translations.launchpad.net/serverguide/precise/+pots/serverguide/LN/+export
   And ask for the .po
   Wait for the e-mail to come saying that the .po is ready.
   Get the .po file
   Replace the old one.
} endfor
Check bzr status
Maybe a check html and pdf build should be done for every language
Commit and Push the branch

Which seems tedious. Is it what needs to be done?
It seems that those web pages do not exist for raring yet.

>> However they are still out of date, as there is a one cycle lag 
>> between serverguide.pot and the .po files. Is that correct?

> This is probably due to a lack of contribution on the part of docteam members so that either the pot file is not updated in bzr frequently enough, or translations are not exported at the appropriate time.

Agreed, and this resulted in the 12.04 version with very very obsolete .po files. For my part of it, and as mentioned previously, I didn't know it needed to be done.

... Doug