This paragraph describes the master file process. It is included in the chapter aimed at package maintainers because it appeared important that Debian Installer package maintainers understand the way translations are handled.
All PO files from all packages sitting under the
packages directory of the Debian Installer source tree are
merged into one single file and translators update this file. These
so-called master PO files are kept into
packages/po into the Debian Installer main directory.
These files are the only files managed by translators. All other PO files as well as PO "templates" files (POT files) are automatically generated by the synchronization scripts (see Section 6.5, “Translation synchronisation”):
merge all templates.pot files into
packages/po/template.pot (files are found
with a recursive find command, which means
that any package with a
debian/po/templates.pot file will have it
included in the master files as soon as the package sits in
packages/;
update packages/po/*.po files according to
this template.pot file
update all individual packages
debian/po/*.po files with the translations
from these single packages/po/*.po files
As a consequence of this process, changes made directly to
debian/po/*.po files are
lost in this process. So, if for some reason,
maintainers need to update these files (there is normally
no reason for this), they should consider
modifying the source files in packages/po.
It is however highly recommended that such changes are discussed with Debian Installer i18n coordinators.