compilemessages does not behave the same as makemessages

[Matthew Somerville]

makemessages was upgraded in Django 1.7 so that it would automatically put app strings in app specific locale files and other strings in the first LOCALE_PATHS entry, as explained in the "Changed in Django 1.7" part of ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/i18n/translation/#message-files. This was ticket #16084.

Ticket #20451 was marked as a duplicate of this ticket, but ticket #16084 only improved makemessages, it didn't change compilemessages at all. compilemessages, when run from the same directory as manage.py, will only compile 'conf/locale', 'locale' and the LOCALE_PATHS .po files, it will not compile any app specific locale files that were created by a call to makemessages.

The documentation on compilemessages does not appear to tell you this, ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/i18n/translation/#compiling-message-files says "This tool runs over all available .po files and creates .mo files". It then says you should run it "In the same directory from which you ran django-admin.py makemessages" which I think is referring to the pre-1.7 behaviour of having to run it in more than one place.

I'm not sure whether it would be better for compilemessages to have the same behaviour as makemessages or for the documentation to update to point out you still need to run it in each app if they have separate locale entries.

[Claude Paroz]

Good point. Unless you see major drawbacks, I think compilemessages should mirror makemessages behavior with regard to affected files.

[Claude Paroz]

#24647 was closed as a duplicate

[Matthew Somerville]

I have made a pull request for this at ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/4521
It uses the same algorithm makemessages is doing, walking down the tree and looking for directories named 'locale'.

[Tim Graham]

Code looks okay to me, but needs documentation as noted on the pull request.

[Matthew Somerville]

Will work on at DjangoCon EU sprint :)

[Tim Graham]

Claude, may I ask for your review?

[Claude Paroz]

Good to go!

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In 40f0a84c:

Fixed #24159 -- Made compilemessages run across all apps.

Updated the command to match the documentation, which states it
runs over all .po files.

[Marcin Nowak]

Hi.

I'm using buildout. Both commands, compilemessages (after #24159 patch) and makemessages, introduced new issues. They scan all nested directories, they're reading (makemessages) and creating (compilemessages) files in external eggs and cloned repositories, even in django itself and unused but stored on disk packages. There is no possibility to exclude or include directories to search. And any broken locale file in any package can break compilation process.

[Claude Paroz]

Please open appropriate tickets with your issues.

And any broken locale file in any package can break compilation process.

This is fixed in master (through #24384).