Replying to myself since I forgot some things... Christian Rose wrote: > While enforcing the use of UTF-8 solves the encodings problem, it is not > feasible for many other reasons. One is simply the lack of support in > many editors and many other text processing tools (and terminals and so > on). Effectively enforcing a particular editor hasn't worked yet, and > probably never will, and it will probably take more time until all > editors natively support UTF-8. Also, many translators use "translation > memories", that is large po format databases with existing translations, > created and managed by special translation memory. s/special translation memory/special translation memory tools/ Also, one important drawback of keeping all translations in one file in CVS, and forcing translators to edit this file, is that it gets almost impossible to verify the integrity of translations. As a translator and creator and maintainer of the translation, I feel that it is important that errors in my translation are my errors alone, and that I'm the only one responsible for them. Translation errors introduced by other people without permission are, well, "annoying" to say the least. With a whole bunch of different people committing to the same file, verifying the integrity of individual translations becomes almost impossible. Such a file will easily become one of the most committed files in gimp CVS, and the danger of someone accidentally or intentionally messing with someone elses translation without permission becomes much more imminent. It's easy to accidentally remove a line too much (and thus removing another translation) when for example cutting and pasting, and there's always the danger of someone wanting to "improve" another translation, without seeing the need to ask first. With a single file, the only way of verifying the integrity of my own translations is basically having to resort to 'cvs diff' after every single commit to this file in CVS, which will hardly be practical. With separate po files, commits to "my" file are much more rare, and I basically only have to ensure that the last committer was me (easily doable by putting in a CVS "$Id$" tag in the file) to be sure that the translation hasn't been changed by someone else without permission. Christian
