discrepancies between bison and bison-runtime textual domains

[Paul Eggert]

We're about to release a new version of Bison, and I'm looking into a
problem with the Bison bootstrap procedure: it's not retrieving the
latest Bison translations from www.iro.umontreal.ca.  Apparently early
this month the Translation Project revamped how translations are
presented.

First, I'd like to get Bison's bootstrap procedure working again.
Second, I noticed some possible glitches in the new translation scheme,
which I thought I'd mention.

========================================

First, how should Bison get the latest translations from the
Translation Project?

The current Bison bootstrap procedure operates first by retrieving
<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/maint/bison/>, and then by
retrieving all the .po files that this catalog refers to.  The newest
translation currently listed, for example, is
<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/maint/bison/fr.po>, dated
2005-06-14 14:27:36 UTC, about 9 months ago.

However, I now notice that the web page
<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=bison>
contains a quite different list of translations, which are newer.
For example, the oldest translation in that index is
<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/teams/PO/zh_TW/bison-2.1.zh_TW.po>,
dated 2006-03-04 21:21:26 UTC, only 10 days ago.

>From the time stamps I suppose that this new list is now definitive,
and that the old list should be ignored.  Is this correct?

However, this raises the question: why are there two lists of
translations, one of which is obsolete?  Shouldn't the latter be
removed?  And yet if I look at the parent
<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/maint/> of the "old"
directory, I see that some projects have been updated quite recently,
e.g., mailutils was updated three days ago.  So I'm a bit puzzled as
to which is the "canonical" source of translations for Bison.

========================================

Second, the "new" translations for Bison seem to have some odd
discrepancies.

<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=bison> and
<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=bison-runtime>
have some apparent glitches and/or gotchas.  I thought I'd
double-check to make sure these discrepancies are intended.

Here they are:

* 'bison-runtime' has 'zh_CN' and 'sl' translations, but 'bison' does not.

* In the 'bison' domain, zh_TW is the only language that lacks a 2.1a version.

* In the 'bison-runtime' domain, zh_CN is the only language that lacks a
2.1a version.

* It looks like someone regenerated all bison/*.po and
bison-runtime/*.po translations at about 2006-03-07 09:52:40 UTC.
However, there are two exceptions: bison/zh_TW.po is dated 2006-03-04
21:21:26 UTC, and bison-runtime/zh_CN.po is dated 2005-12-03 19:43:04.