Simon Josefsson wrote: > Then that could be packaged separately, and not strongly tied > into the release process of each project.
Then the quality of the translations would suffer. The TP's guidelines [1] say: "Preferably you make a prerelease a week or so earlier and announce this to the TP, so the translators get a chance to update their PO files before the actual release of your package, so the release can go out fully translated into several languages." The reason for this guideline is that from one release to the next, some msgids (maybe 10%, depending on the activity of the developers) change. If a user uses release N together with the .mo files from release N-1 or N+1, typically only 90% of the messages will be translated. Wheres of the user uses release N together with the .mo files from release N, 100% of the messages will be translated, for translation teams that react quickly and update the translations within the given week. Thus, separating the distribution of the PO files from the release process of the code is a bad idea. Bruno [1] https://translationproject.org/html/maintainers.html
