[Po4a-devel] Bug: reliance on empty lines

Hey, before I come across as being negative I would like to thank you for this nice project. I generally love it and am grateful for it. Now on to the problem I've stumbled across yesterday. Due to one of my scripts running amok I recently found out the hard way that po4a-translate relies on the presence of empty lines in exactly the right places. This is worrisome for two reasons: 1) it doesn't match the behavior of the msg* utilities and 2) it introduces the potential for subtle and hard-to-find problems. I also care about 3) po4a-translate exiting with 0 even if it had to discard the translation making it harder to detect such issues during build processes. From my analysis each empty line is used as a separator between entries. So for a file lacking any empty line none of the lines will appear to be translated to po4a-translate. Observe (starting out with a good file): [0 mosu@sweet-chili (master) ~/prog/video/mkvtoolnix] /usr/bin/vendor_perl/po4a-translate -v -v -M utf-8 -k 1 -f docbook -m doc/man/mkvmerge.xml -p doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po -l /dev/null doc/man/mkvmerge.xml is 95.17% translated (533 of 560 strings). [0 mosu@sweet-chili (master) ~/prog/video/mkvtoolnix] sed -i -e '/^$/d' doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po [0 mosu@sweet-chili (master) ~/prog/video/mkvtoolnix] /usr/bin/vendor_perl/po4a-translate -v -v -M utf-8 -k 1 -f docbook -m doc/man/mkvmerge.xml -p doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po -l /dev/null Discard the translation of doc/man/mkvmerge.xml (only 0% translated; need 1%). However, msg* doesn't care. This is still run with the bad file produced above(I've stripped the output down to just nl.po and mkvmerge.xml for brevity): [0 mosu@sweet-chili (master) ~/prog/video/mkvtoolnix] po4a -d -M utf-8 -k 1 --msgmerge-opt=--no-wrap doc/man/po4a/po4a.cfg cmd=[po4a_paths]; main=doc/man/po4a/po/mkvtoolnix.pot; args="nl:doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po" cmd=[type: docbook]; main=doc/man/mkvmerge.xml; args="$lang:doc/man/$lang/mkvmerge.xml" Updating doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po: msgmerge -U doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po doc/man/po4a/po/mkvtoolnix.pot --no-wrap --previous --backup=none ........................................................................................................................... done. doc/man/po4a/po/nl.po: 776 translated messages, 27 fuzzy translations, 31 untranslated messages. Now, removing all blank lines is certainly one of the more extreme issues. However, even with this done the problem remained undetected for ten months including seven releases of my software, also because po4a-translate exits with 0 even if it discards the translation. The problem I'm more worried about, though, is 2) the potential for subtle bugs. Using a normal text editor it's easy to remove such an empty line accidentally. It's also easy to botch up some merge during development. Or for some script to run amok. So please fix the reliance on empty lines and implement proper msgid/msgstr parsing. Also please consider changing the exit code to anything but 0 if po4a-translate has to discard the translation with -k …. It would make integration into any build process more reliable. Thanks. Kind regards, mosu