pkgstriptranslations(1)

💖 pkgstriptranslations 💖

okay bestie, so this one is a General Commands Manual situation, and it's literally called pkgstriptranslations — say that five times fast, i dare you. it's giving "tiny script, huge job" energy and honestly? iconic. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

pkgstriptranslations — extract translation files and remove gettext *.mo files from package build directories 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pkgstriptranslations

no flags, no arguments, no drama. she just does it. periodt. 💅

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💫 DESCRIPTION 💫

okay so here's the tea. pkgstriptranslations goes through your source and package build directories and extracts literally all the gettext related files, then tucks them into:

<pkg-build-dir>/../package_version_arch_suffix.tar.gz

and that suffix? it's configurable in /etc/pkgbinarymangler/striptranslations.conf and defaults to translations. so if you don't touch anything, that's what you get. 💖

🎀 Tarball layout 🎀

• source/ — contains all the pot and po files from the source package, and yes it preserves the directory structure, she's respectful like that 🫶
• debname1/, debname2/, ... — there's literally one directory per generated binary deb package, and each one contains all the .mo files from that deb, again with the directory structure preserved. no cap. ✨

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🧚 the deleting part 🧚

this script also removes all gettext *.mo files below <pkg-build-dir>/usr/share/locale from all the built binary packages. and bestie, she's thorough — she'll also remove subdirectories that became empty after the gettext files were yeeted. 🧹💀

however. there's a plot twist. if a file /CurrentlyBuilding is present (like on the Ubuntu autobuilders), then the *.mo files are only deleted if the Component: value inside that file matches one of the components configured in /etc/pkgbinarymangler/striptranslations.conf. this is the whole point, actually — it lets you selectively strip files only for source packages that are in e.g. main and restricted, but not in e.g. universe. selective queen behavior. 👑

lowkey important: by default, pkgstriptranslations is inactive. to enable it, the enable option in the configuration file must be set to true. she's asleep until you wake her up. 😴➡️🔥

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🌈

• NO_PKG_MANGLE — if this variable is set to a nonempty value, then pkgstriptranslations is disabled. this is most useful if source packages build nested binary packages as part of their build. 🛑

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

pkgstriptranslations is developed by Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@canonical.com>. 💜

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and that's the whole page, bestie. the source/version and date on this one? it's Martin Pitt, dated December 17, 2004 — so yeah, she's been slaying since way before you were born, and she's still serving. 🫶✨🎀💖