Comment # 47 on bug 952855 from Stanislav Brabec

Comment 46 (Erwan GEORGET): Your point is valid.

Translation update makes sense for products with long life time, where no
version updates are done. Then it allows to import latest translation without
touching the package itself. Tumbleweed is not the case, and openSUSE products
in general have not such a long life time like SLE. In case of SLE, a way to
update translation is needed. Imagine that the new SLE11 SP4 comes with GNOME
2.28. Many translation work was done since the GNOME 2.28 release.

The process of translation update was invented long time ago before
introduction of -lang packages.

But -lang packages itself provide no solution for translation updates. They are
generated during compilation.


The long term plan is obsoleting of translation-update* packages. We should
invent a tool that will be able to update -lang packages directly. The current
translation-update-upstream/upstream-collect.sh is a very complex tool, and it
cannot be easily ported. This is a big task, which requires improvement of
gettext-tools. (Being able to correctly merge po files with different plural
forms, being able to compare last update time and being able to merge po file
headers line by line are the most important missing features.) Then we can
start with designing of a new tool that will be well integrated with OBS.