po/fetch-po (GNU gettext utilities)

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14.4.2 fetch-po in po/ ¶

The po/ directory should also contain an executable shell script named fetch-po. It is supposed to fetch the PO files, produced by translators, from a translations project’s site on the internet, store them in the current directory, and generate a LINGUAS file accordingly. (More on that below.)

This script does not take any arguments.

An initial fetch-po file can be installed by gettextize. But you may need to customize it.

There are two ways of implementing the fetch-po script:

• In packages whose translators commit their PO files directly into the version control of the package, or where a translations project’s daemon does this automatically on behalf of the translators, this script does not do anything.
• In packages where the translations are collected by a translation project, it uses a po-fetch invocation. See Put the PO Files under Version Control or not? for this script’s relation to version control, and see Invoking the po-fetch Program for the possible arguments.

This script implements the Makefile’s target fetch-po.

This script is not contained in distribution tarballs by default, because it is part of the maintainer’s release management infrastructure and because it may, in rare cases, contain secrets (such as API keys).