Comment 10 for bug 559997

Thanks for looking into this Scott.

I see that you have now added 'make -C po update-po' to debian/rules and that should do the trick.

In packages which use intltool (which extends gettext by supporting internationalisation of things such as .desktop files, so it is generally used in GUI-based programs) it's a bit easier, since if there is no other way of doing it (e.g. using langpack.mk in the package), at least you can call 'intltool-update -p', which creates the template without building all the .mo files for translations.

Using 'update-po' will fix the problem for translators. From a packaging point of view, you might also want to look at using 'make -C po mountall.pot-update' (the $(DOMAIN).pot-update rule in the Makefile), which has the advantage that it only creates the .pot file without building the translations. In mountall it does not make a difference right now simply because the po directory does not contain any .po files - the translations are shipped in the language packs.

In any case, I also agree that we need a unified aproach for this.