Stop checking `gitlab.pot` into source control
Description of the proposal
Not exactly a coding style proposal, but I believe we should investigate whether we can stop checking locale/gitlab.pot
into source control.
It's an automatically generated file, but keeping it up to date with the source is a manual step, and frequently leads to CE->EE conflicts as well. This is in spite of our best efforts to guard against it before merge with the linting jobs.
I don't really understand why we check it in at all. We could instead .gitignore
it, and generate it as part of the release process, in the same way we precompile assets. In development, it would just be another step that gdk needs to run.
It looks like this question was asked before: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33014 but not really answered - we just ended up reducing the number of conflicts by not automatically updating some fields.
@rdavila do you know of any reason why this generated file has to be part of the repository? What support code elsewhere would we need if we stopped checking it into version control?
-
Mention the proposal in the next backend weekly call and the #backend channel to encourage contribution -
Proceed with the proposal once 50% of the maintainers have weighed in, and 80% of the votes are 👍 -
Once approved, mention it again in the next backend weekly call and the #backend channel
Questions
-
Can we generate the file in production? - Not at present. Do we need to?
-
Does crowdin need the file in the repository? - Needs to be explored further.
- Hopefully they could consume a build artifact instead
-
Install from source instructions will need to be updated - Definitely