Pidgin is string frozen!

[Mark Doliner]

2008/12/17 Mișu Moldovan <dumol at gnome.ro>:
> "Mark Doliner" <mark at kingant.net> a scris:
>> Pidgin, Finch and libpurple are now "string frozen" pending the
>> release of version 2.5.3 next Thursday, December 18th.  Translators,
>> please use this time to work your magic and update your favorite
>> translation.
>>
>> You can find up-to-date translation statistics and download a current
>> pidgin.pot file (at the bottom of the page) at
>> http://developer.pidgin.im/l10n/
>>
>> Developers, please avoid changing existing strings or adding new ones.
>>  And try to avoid making large changes that could potentially
>> introduce bugs.
>
> I haven't touched Pidgin's Romanian translation since 2.5.0 and now I'm
> confused by the fact that the references to the source files from the
> PO files are missing entirely.
>
> Does anyone know why those commented strings vanished? I think they
> often help when trying to understand the context in which a certain
> string appears. They also helped me give a lower priority to strings
> associated with IM protocols that are not used here: QQ, Gadu-Gadu and
> the like.
>
> Is there a way to get them back?

That's a fantastic question!  A while ago we made a decision to avoid
checking in po files with the references to the source files because
they contain line numbers which change frequently and create very
large diffs.  With many translations these diffs can become rather
large, and we wanted to avoid having our repository grow so much.

It should be possible to temporarily add the context information back
while translating, and then strip it before committing or submitting
your po.  How to do this depends on the tools you use for translating,
and the other translators will hopefully be able to give you better
advice.  But I know the context information is removed by passing the
--no-location flag to msgmerge.  There is also an --add-location flag.

-Mark