Re: [PATCH] msggrep --invert-match

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Colin Watson wrote:
> I spend a fair chunk of time "branding" the Debian installer's
> translations for Ubuntu (a distribution derived from Debian), that is,
> taking any strings that refer to Debian and making them refer to Ubuntu
> instead. This is pretty tedious work and obviously I try to automate it
> as much as I can.
>
> One of the tasks I often have to do by hand at the moment is removing
> strings that don't make any sense for Ubuntu, such as the Debian
> installer's option to select whether you want to install stable,
> testing, or unstable, which makes sense for Debian but for reasons I
> won't go into here is not at all relevant to Ubuntu. In order to keep
> down the size of our diff versus Debian (people often look through it to
> see what we've done, so it's important for it to be as small as
> possible), to reduce the probability and complexity of future merge
> conflicts, and because I happen to know in this case that the strings
> I'm removing are very unlikely to be useful to translators even if kept
> around with an obsolete #~ marker, I prefer to remove the translations
> of these strings entirely. The translations are still available in
> Debian, so they aren't lost.
>
> In order to do this, I looked for a msggrep option analogous to 'grep
> -v', but couldn't find one. The following patch against current CVS adds
> such an option. In this patch I've included a short -v option as well as
> the long --invert-match, for least-surprise for people familiar with
> grep, although since I know -v is synonymous with --verbose in other
> msg* tools I would understand if you thought it were better to omit the
> short option.

Thank you for a well motivated, well explained and perfectly done
patch. I've applied your patch to GNU gettext (with only minor tweaks
in the usage message). Thanks a lot!

Bruno