Hi all!
TL;DR: Use the "TRANSLATORS" tag for marking the comments for translators.
Full version:
Currently we extract *all* preceding comments to the generated POT files. The
side
effect is that in some cases the comment contains the license header, Yardoc
comments
or even commented out code. That might be confusing for translators.
The solution is to use some special tag and instruct gettext to extract the
comments only following this special tag. We already use the "TRANSLATORS" tag
in YaST for that.
Example:
# this comment is *not* copied to the POT file
# TRANSLATORS: this comment *is* copied to the POT file
# this *is* copied as well
_("Translatable text")
Unfortunately it is not used everywhere, when I tried to use it globally a lot
of
comments from POT files were lost.
For that reason I have introduced the POTCOMMENTS file, similar to the existing
POTFILES used in some repositories. That file should contain the tag name
passed to
gettext. I.e. it should just contain the "TRANSLATORS" value so it is the same
in all
repositories.
If that file is missing the old approach (all comments) is used, so it is
backward
compatible and we can gradually fix the modules one by one.
See https://github.com/yast/yast-devtools/pull/166 for the implementation
details
and https://github.com/yast/yast-firstboot/pull/136 as an example how it was
fixed in
one YaST module.
Enjoy!
Ladislav
--
Ladislav Slezák
YaST Developer
SUSE LINUX, s.r.o.
Corso IIa
Křižíkova 148/34
18600 Praha 8
