sukria.net

Thanks to the Debian i18n Team, and more precisely to Christian Perrier, I’m now a bit more armed when I have to deal with Debconf translations.

Indeed, I recently started to rewrite the backup-manager’s Debconf templates, in order to fix bad wordings and DTSG violations. Doing so is a good thing, but that means that you’ll have - at a given point - to send the new templates.pot files back to every translators. If you don’t, a lot of fuzzy strings will break the Debconf translation.

After some discussions on the debian-i18n list, I managed to setup a tiny target in my debian/rules which helps me a lot:

checkpo:
        for i in po/*.po; do \
                echo "Checking: $$i"; \
                msgmerge -U $$i po/templates.pot; \
                msgfmt -o /dev/null -c --statistics $$i; \
        done

Running ./rules checkpo lets you know if some .po files need some more attention.
The tool podebconf-report-po is also a great friend to have in such circumstances, it can helps you notify the translators that some updates are required.

Debian