[Perkamon-devel] Bug#786525: Disruptive changes should be loudly announced

[David Prévot]

Hi Martin,

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 10:39:33PM +0200, Martin Quinson wrote:

> You could even raise the gravity of that
> bug to block the package transition to testing if you feel that this
> change should be reverted.

Even if disruptive changes in the gettext/po4a toolchain (and underlined
Perl handling) are always painful (one has to make sure every
contributor is using the “right” version, the amount of changes in the
PO files to cope with the upgrade can be huge), with my Debian packager
hat on, I’d say that now (early in the development cycle) is exactly the
right moment to make such change if it’s an improvement worthing the
disruption.

CCing perkamon lists since the man-pages translation project may be even
more affected by this change and is likely to have more to say about it
(thinking about all the charsets(7) manpages containing tables is a bit
terrifying ;). I believe changing the tbl handling has already been
discussed in the past but was not followed upon because of it being too
disruptive, but I may misremember.

I hope the “convert a pre-existing translation to po4a” HOWTO from
po4a(7) will ease the PO files changes needed to cope with the new way
to handle man pages table (I intend to give it a try soon for procps and
findutils, unless this change is to be reverted of course). I’ll report
back if there is an “easy way to upgrade” worth documenting with the
“beware, disruptive change!” currently missing.

Keeping the initial bug report as context for the newly CCed people.

Regards

David

> On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 11:10:56AM -0400, David Prévot wrote:
> > Package: po4a
> > Version: 0.46-1
[…]
> > I just spent a fair amount of time searching what did I do wrong while
> > updating some manpages-fr-extra PO files, and finally figured out that
> > the “Man module splits tbl's textblocks into separate lines” change in
> > po4a was likely the cause of the fair amount of changes I witnessed in
> > the PO file I was currently dealing with.
> > 
> > Please, do at least add a NEW entry to help users figure out that this
> > change may cause a fair amount of new fuzzied strings when upgrading to
> > this version.
> > 
> > 
> > With po4a 0.45-1:
> > 
> > $ LC_ALL=C make stats
> > findutils: 760 translated messages.
> > […]
> > procps: 1948 translated messages.
> > […]
> > util-linux: 3683 translated messages, 575 fuzzy translations, 311 untranslated messages.
> > (or, with the file I was currently working on)
> > util-linux: 4397 translated messages, 43 fuzzy translations, 129 untranslated messages.
> > 
> > 
> > After upgrading po4a to 0.46-1:
> > 
> > $ LC_ALL=C make stats
> > findutils: 716 translated messages, 35 fuzzy translations, 15 untranslated messages.
> > […]
> > procps: 1507 translated messages, 199 fuzzy translations, 222 untranslated messages.
> > […]
> > util-linux: 3647 translated messages, 625 fuzzy translations, 329 untranslated messages.
> > (or, with the file I was currently working on)
> > util-linux: 4322 translated messages, 132 fuzzy translation, 147 untranslated messages.
> > 
> > 
> > Having to deal with hundreds of noop changes is not really nice, even
> > less so when it comes as a surprise.
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