Making gettext CVS friendly

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

gettext-enabled packages change *.po files that can be under version
control.  This causes many inconveniences.  I didn't report the because I 
was ready to tolerate them, but now this behavior is a problem for other 
users who want to use CVS:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc/2002-October/msg00000.html

You see, that guy just compiled the package without editing any files, 
then updated from CVS and got conflicts.

gettext 0.10.x was bad already because "make dist" would change *.po
files.  I'm using "make dist" for snapshots, and I don't want to commit
new *.po files to CVS.

gettext 0.11.x goes much further - it changes *.po files by the mere "make
all".  That is a major inconvenience for everybody using CVS or any other
version control system.

CVS is affected more than e.g. Subversion, since it sends all modified
files to the server, and many users of cable modems have a low upload
speed.  But all systems are affected because gettext makes local
modifications in the version-controlled files - something that only
developers are supposed to do.  Every version control system has to
respect local changes.

I suggest that we change the way how gettext operates.  This is my plan.  
Corrections are welcome.  I'm ready to implement whatever we decide to do.

Generate *.pox (updated po) from *.po if needed.
Generate *.gmo from *.pox on "make all" if needed.
On "make distdir", copy *.pox to distdir, renaming them to *.po.
Copy *.pox to *.po on "make update-po" only.

By the way, this mailing list doesn't seem to be archived on the web.  
It's probably a good idea to keep archives available.  Then I could check
if something like that was suggested already.  I checked bug-gnu-utils,
but it's "owned" by spammers.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin