Re: FYI: Makefile.maint and po files

[Tim Van Holder]

On 29 Aug 2001 12:55:59 +0200, Akim Demaille wrote:
> 
> Index: ChangeLog
> from  Akim Demaille  <address@hidden>
>       * Makefile.maint (do-po-update): Wget refuses to overwrite files:
>       download in a tmp dir.
> 
> Index: Makefile.maint
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvs/autoconf/Makefile.maint,v
> retrieving revision 1.15
> diff -u -u -r1.15 Makefile.maint
> --- Makefile.maint 2001/08/28 08:55:06 1.15
> +++ Makefile.maint 2001/08/29 10:47:55
> @@ -60,8 +60,11 @@
>  po_repo = http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/maint/$(PACKAGE)
>  .PHONY: do-po-update po-update
>  do-po-update:
> -     cd $(srcdir)/po && wget -r -l1 -nd --no-parent -A '*.po' $(po_repo)
> -     rm $(srcdir)/po/index.html
> +     tmppo=/tmp/$(PACKAGE)-$(VERSION)-po &&\
> +     rm -rf $$tmppo && \
> +     mkdir $$tmppo && \
> +     (cd $$tmppo && $(WGET) -r -l1 -nd --no-parent -A '*.po' $(po_repo)) &&\
> +     cp $$tmppo/*.po po
>       cd po && $(MAKE) update-po
>       $(MAKE) po-check

Two things I'm unhappy with here: first, the hardcoded use of '/tmp';
this should really be 'tmppo=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/blah-po && \ ...'.
Secondly, overwriting the .po files is not very nice.  A translator
is used to using 'make update-po' in a po dir to update her translations
to match the current .pot file.  Having a top-level 'po-update' rule
that discards all local translations without any warning is annoying
(even if it's a maintainer rule; after all, maintainer-clean does not
remove .po files either).
I'd suggest backing up existing .po files (to .pob maybe?) and then
using wget in-place. This also handles cases where a .po was removed
from the archives (for whatever reason).