Comment changes in POT files make ISO builds non-reproducible

Originally created by @intrigeri on #12641 (Redmine)

Sometimes we update a program of ours and as a result the line numbers encoded in comments, in the POT file generated by refresh-translations, differ. And then POT + PO files will get updated every time we build an ISO, resulting in non-reproducible builds. This happens quite frequently (e.g. yesterday, and generally I’m baby-sitting Jenkins results closely enough to notice, and then I run refresh-translations, commit and push to fix the problem. It’s a waste of my time, and I don’t even want to consider sharing this dumb work better. We’d better simply eliminate the root cause of this problem :)

To this end, I think we instead should:

• make refresh-translations ignore changes in comments by default, just like it already ignores changes in the POT creation date header; this way ISO builds won’t be made needlessly unreproducible by such trivial changes;
• give refresh-translations a --force option, that we’ll use in the release process to ensure we regularly update even those usually ignored comments.

I guess both intltool_update_po and intltool_update_pot functions and the refresh-translations script need to be changed. Perhaps import-translations as well but I’m less sure (one would need to look exactly when/how/why we run it to make a good decision).

Who wants to do it? Either anonym or Ulrike, I guess? If you prefer I can handle it myself, stealing from your time budget.

Feature Branch: bugfix/12641+potfile_line_comments

Parent Task: #5630 (closed)

Related issues

• Blocked by #14459 (closed)