[PATCH 0/7] Various i18n fixes (and questions)

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2017, David Malcolm wrote:
> However, we're deep in stage 4 of the development cycle.  Looking at
> our development plan
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html
> it's not clear to me how such changes fit into our schedule: the plan
> seems to make no mention of how i18n and translation fit in to the
> stages (it talks about bugs and documentation, but not about translatable
> strings).

A key reason documentation changes of all sorts are fine is that there 
is very little risk for them to break the build on some platform, but
not others.  (Of course different versions of makeinfo may run into
different things, but that, too, will be noticed and can be fixed
quickly.  And does not happen all that often.)

So the question I'd ask:  What is the risk of such changes breaking
things?  If it's not big, probably makes sense to just proceed with
your changes.

> Do we have a "string freeze" in our schedule?  i.e. is there a point
> at which we avoid changing strings to avoid disrupting things for
> translators?

I am not aware of one, though I'd say latest after the branch point 
we probably should be careful in not changing things too much (unless
something is really broken)?

(GCC is not exactly for end users, and most people using it, in
particular a brand new release, will understand English when push 
comes to shove, which is what's shown if a message is not translated,
correct?)

> Also, from a developer POV, when should we regenerate and check-in
> the .pot files?  The rules for submitting patches:
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html
> and for committing them:
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/svnwrite.html
> seem to make no mention of gettext and .pot files.

That's a good point.  Joseph, can you help fill that in?  (If you
give me a bit of text, I can take care of HTMLifying and adding it.)

Gerald