Re: Bug#594059: gettext: xgettext should not complain about UTF-8 (fwd)

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2010, Bruno Haible wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> W. Martin Borgert wrote:
> > # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
> > name=_("Åland Islands")
> > name=_("Côte d'Ivoire")
> > 
> > and the command line
> > 
> > $ xgettext --language=Python --omit-header --output=/dev/null utf8.py
> > 
> > leads to the following warnings:
> > ...
> > utf8.py:2: invalid multibyte sequence
> 
> This is an error, not a warning.
> 
> > Btw. there is a similar bug report at
> > http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/4734
> 
> Thanks for this pointer. That text says "It's due to --omit-header option
> passed to xgettext". This is documented in the doc of xgettext:
> 
>   `--omit-header'
>        Don't write header with `msgid ""' entry.
>        ...
>        Note that using this option will lead to an error if the resulting
>        file would not entirely be in ASCII.
> 
> > Because UTF-8 is the default and recommended encoding in
> > Debian (and, as far as I know, in PO files)
> 
> Nope, the default encoding in PO files is ASCII. The header entry contains
> meta-information that allows the PO file to contain UTF-8 non-ASCII
> characters. If you tell xgettext to omit the header entry, it cannot produce
> an unambiguous PO file any more.
> 
> What the default encoding in Debian is, does not matter for PO and POT files,
> because PO and POT files are meant to be transferred from/to the machines
> of translators, that is, between machines that run different operating 
> systems,
> and Debian is not the only OS in the world.
> 
> The solution is:
>   1. to always keep and generate a header in each PO and POT file,
>   2. use xgettext to combine two POT files, and use the other tools (msgcat,
>      msgattrib, etc.) when needed.

Thanks a lot, Bruno.

Closing then, as this is not really a bug but a feature and it's properly 
documented.