Re: Few questions about .pot

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 07:31:09PM -0700, Jasem Mutlaq wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> I have few questions :-)
> 
> 1) How do you create the initial .pot file for an application? I know you can 
> edit the .pot using KBabel, but how do you create .pot in the first place?

This is done by using 'xgettext', a utility that comes with the 'gettext' package.
You may want to refer to:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/gettext/html_chapter/gettext_4.html#SEC20

> 
> 2) When I "compile" a file in KBabel, it gives it an extension of .gmo, but 
> when I checked the files under /opt/kde3/share/locale/ar, I found them all 
> with an extension .mo, what's the difference? I got KStars to work in arabic 
> by simply changing the extension to .mo, but is that all?

.mo's are the binary format of the message catalog of the .po's. The application
during compilation creates .mo's (using 'msgfmt').

> 
> 3) now I have a translation for KStars called kstars.po, if KStars.pot was 
> changed by the developer, do I have to translate the whole thing again or is 
> there a way to merge kstars.pot and kstars.po to translate only the new 
> things that have been added?
> 

You don't have to worry about that. The Arabeyes CVS tree is synced with
KDE's periodically. Depending on the set priorities, branches are followed
from the KDE CVS. This is one of the things Isam Bayazidi is responsible
of. So all you have to do is update your cvs working copy from that of 
Arabeyes to keep up with the changes.


Cheers!
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://fakkir.net/~elzubeir/|
-------------------------------------------------------