PO file format documentation of obsolete entries #~

[Vivien Kraus]

Dear gettext developers,

PO files may have obsolete entries such as:

#, fuzzy
#~| msgid "~a: warning: ~a~%"
#~ msgid "warning: "
#~ msgstr "~a: advarsel: ~a~%"

(from the Danish translations for Guix)

>From what I can see [1], the #~ syntax (and its #~| sibling) is not
described in the manual section for PO files, because they are not
“translator comments” (unless the '~' character is to be understood as
white space):

> Then comments follow, on lines all starting with the
> character @code{#}.  There are two kinds of comments: those which
> have
> some white space immediately following the @code{#} - the
> @var{translator
> comments} -, which comments are created and maintained exclusively by
> the
> translator, and those which have some non-white character just after
> the
> @code{#} - the @var{automatic comments} -, which comments are created
> and
> maintained automatically by GNU @code{gettext} tools.  Comment lines
> starting with @code{#.} contain comments given by the programmer,
> directed
> at the translator; these comments are called @var{extracted comments}
> because the @code{xgettext} program extracts them from the program's
> source code.  Comment lines starting with @code{#:} contain
> references to
> the program's source code.  Comment lines starting with @code{#,}
> contain
> flags; more about these below.  Comment lines starting with @code{#|}
> contain the previous untranslated string for which the translator
> gave
> a translation.

Maybe a note could be dropped here for the #~ and #~| syntaxes for
automatic comments describing obsolete entries. As far as I understand,
they are not extracted by xgettext though. The only part where #~ is
mentioned is in the msgattrib documentation.

Wishing you a whole new year of happy hacking.

Vivien

[1]
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/gettext-tools/doc/gettext.texi#n1486