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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    MO files not optimised enough (esp. en_GB, en_CA, etc) in KDE
From:       Simos Xenitellis <simos.lists () googlemail ! com>
Date:       2007-07-23 16:41:36
Message-ID: 1185208896.5561.55.camel () computer
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Hi All,
There is an issue in gettext-tools regarding an optimisation
that is described at 
http://blogs.gnome.org/simos/2007/07/23/important-mo-file-optimisation-for-en_-locales-and-partly-others/

Translation teams often copy the msgid string to
msgstr if they feel there is no need for translation, and they do so to
keep count of the messages they have reviewed compared to the new ones
that may appear later.

The issue is that msgfmt compiles those messages into the MO files,
increasing their size without any apparent usefulness.
This issue is more important for the en_GB, en_CA, etc locales that they
actually need to translate only a few messages and the rest are copies
of the msgid value.

The bottomline is that you may want to adapt your toolchain so that when
you create installation packages, only the minimum required space is
occupied by the MO files. This saves disk space and most importantly in
memory.

There is an effort to get "msgfmt" automatically to ignore those copied
messages that would solve the issue transparently. I am not sure yet if
this will get accepted upstream.

Specifically, there is a construct in files (am GNOME guy...) such as
kgeograghy:

msgid ""
"_: world.kgm\n"
"Zambia"
msgstr "Zambia"

that you would need some extra work to make it understand that this
message can be omited from the MO file.

Hope this helps,
Simos


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