Comment 5 for bug 683342

It's all about the workfow, translating is different than packaging. Example:

I've developed a new functionality. Before committing the changes, I want to update the .pot translation template, so that the new strings are made available to the translators in Launchpad. Currently I need to execute the "packaging" workflow, which is not intuitive. Additionnaly, it displays eventual error messages about classes that are not found, asks me if I want to continue packaging, etc., all things that are not related to translations.

If we had a simple command that would refresh the .pot file (quickly translate?), we could for example put that as a bzr pre-commit hook, so that the translation template are automatically updated before each commit, ensuring that the translation available in Launchpad is always up to date.

It's good that before packaging, the translations get compiled, but you really want those new strings to be translated BEFORE packaging your application, otherwise this package is always containing not up-to-date translations.

Would it be difficult to implement such a command? The command should do 2 things:
- Update the .pot template by scanning all the files
- Compile the available .po files into .mo, so that the currently available translations show up in the program.