Re: gettext: msgcomm vs. msgcat and the handling of empty records

[Karl Eichwalder]

address@hidden (Bruno Haible) writes:

> Karl Eichwalder writes:

>> > remove msgcomm since all it can do is covered by msgcat.
>
> msgcomm does the merging differently than msgcat.

At least, to have a compatibily switch would be nice; otherwise you have
to fill the .pot file artificially (e.g., using 'msgen').

> Sure. msgcat is made for combining translator efforts made in
> different files. Untranslated messages represent no translator effort.

Translators often want to shuffle around translated messages.  And I'm
not sure whether 'msg' tools are meant for translators only.

Anyway, consider to add the tests and tell the user that untranslated
messages will be ignored.  Note, when msgcat evals --less-than/more-than
it looks at the msgid (not at the msgstr)!

> Then you'll probably want to use msgcomm and/or msgattrib in some way.

Okay, than we cannot drop msgcomm.

>> it isn't possible to remove all translations given .po file
>> ('msghack' offered --empty to empty the contents of a po .file).
>
> 'msgfilter sed -e d' empties the contents of a po file as well.

Isn't this a little bit expensive?  It will call sed for every single
message -- okay, we happily can recycle process IDs ;)

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