Re: how to harvest translatable strings from generated files?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Paul Pogonyshev wrote:
> I have a custom-format files which a parsed during build process with
> custom tools to generate C files.  Some of these files contain translable
> strings. Apparently, I cannot feed the custom files to `xgettext', because
> it doesn't understand their format.

Yes, and it is some effort to make 'xgettext' understand a custom format.
It's better to generate some dummy C file, just as input for xgettext,
such as

  gettext("foo");
  /* TRANSLATORS: ...some comment for the translators... */
  gettext("bar");

> At the same time, C files end up in
> the build directory, which is not necessarily the same as the source
> directory.

You can either create the dummy C file in the source directory, and
distribute it with your package. The same way as you handle the output
from bison or flex.

Or you can create the dummy C file in the build directory, during "make" -
like you do with .o files -, and constrain yourself to not do "make update-po"
or "make dist" when $builddir != $srcdir. Remember, xgettext is not run
by a normal "make"; only when the maintainer invokes it explicitly through
"make update-po" or "make dist".

Bruno