With the upcoming tests/checks/gettext.fish test from #11583, my
sudo docker/docker_run_tests.sh --shell-after docker/focal.Dockerfile
fails writing to "po/template.po" because "/fish-source" is mounted as
read-only. (There should be no need for tests to write to the source tree.)
Since commit 6239cba1e4 (Add dry-run mode to update_translations.fish,
2025-05-30), "build_tools/update_translations.fish" always removes that
template file when done, even without "--dry-run".
I'm not sure if we still have a need for keeping around "po/template.po".
To add a new translation, you can run "build_tools/update_translations
po/xy.po". It could serve as a cache but that would only work if we integrated
it into a build system.
Move it to /tmp, fixing the docker tests.
This is intended to allow translation updates in contexts where building within
the `fish_xgettext.fish` script is undesirable.
Specifically, this allows checking for PO file updates in the tests run by
`test_driver.py`. Because these use a tmpdir for `$HOME`, building within such a
test requires installing the entire Rust toolchain and doing a clean build,
which is a waste of resources.
With this argument, it is possible to build the template before running the
tests and passing the file path into the script.
This mode is intended for testing if the PO files are up-to-date and
well-formed.
At the moment, we only check translations in CI, where this is not particularly
relevant. Once we no longer need `cargo-expand`
(e.g. via https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/11536)
we can extend the `check_translations.fish` test to run
`update_translations.fish --dry-run` and fail if the exit status is nonzero.
There is no reason to have this file clutter the repo root.
Move it into the `po` directory, and give it a more descriptive name.
Inspired by this discussion:
https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/11463#discussion_r2083453275
I use `template.po` instead of `message.po-template` to be more compatible with
automatic filetype detection. (e.g. vim/nvim detect the former as a po file, but
the latter as a conf file)
The purpose of this script is to simplify the translation-related workflow for
both developers and translators. It runs the xgettext, msgmerge, msgfmt pipeline
(or only parts of it, depending on the arguments), either for all languages, or
for one specific one.
Developers can use the script with the `--no-mo` flag to update the PO files for
all languages after changes to the Rust/fish sources, to keep the translations
up to date. Ideally, this would run automatically for all changes, such that
translations are always up to date, but for now, it would already be an
improvement to run this script before releasing a new version of fish.
Translators can use the script in the same way as developers, to get up to date
PO files. To see their translations in action, the script can be called with
`--only-mo`, which takes the current version of the PO files and generates MO
files from them, which get placed in a location which fish (built with `cargo
build`) can detect.
Translators might also find it useful to specify the language they want to work
on as a non-option argument. This argument should be the path to the po file
they want to work on. Specifying non-existing files to work on a new language is
allowed, but the files must be in the po directory and follow the naming
convention.
