I already announced that Gammu translations were converted to
gettext. Reasons for conversion were written already some time ago.
Now I'd like to write about some technical details on conversion.
First I thought the conversion will be simple. Just convert one text file
format to other. Unfortunately there were lots of typos in old
translations, which I had to fix, because gettext is much stricter about
syntax. This itself would be also good reason to switch - old
localisations had several types of errors, most frequently bad escaped
quotes or messed format strings. This sometimes lead to Gammu crash,
because it confuses printf like functions.
Another thing which was broken in old translation were duplicates of
some strings. There were about 20 duplicate messages, which only added
work to translators and were never used, because Gammu used first string
which matched.
After I spot common mistakes, it was quite easy to write conversion
script which would handle them. It is written in Python and uses its
ConfigParser module to read old localisations. Using already done
modules makes thinks a lot easier :-). After reading them, they are
fixed to avoid syntax errors in gettext and written in gettext format to
new file. All this in 123 lines of code (well, many of this are comments
and string constants).
PS: You can download conversion script here, maybe it will be
usable also for some other project.