How does one source pinned translations for reproducible release tarballs?

[Bruno Haible]

[Adding bug-gettext in CC.]

Alexander Sosedkin wrote:
> >What I can do is provide a backup tarball at the TP, every
> >month.  A backup script runs for this purpose already, making
> >a backup for each team, so it's easy to add a separate line
> >for gnulib.  I've created an example tarball at:
> >
> >  https://translationproject.org/backups/2026-09/gnulib.tgz
> >
> >Instead of fetching the latest PO files from the TP, GnuTLS
> >would fetch the gnulib.tgz backup tarball of the preceding
> >month from the TP.  Would that be useful?
> 
> Yes, very much yes.
> If translations would be retrievable in form of a stable snapshots,
> that'd solve my problem entirely,
> and one month seems like a reasonable interval to me.
> 
> I just wanna note I'm after the gnutls ones, not the gnulib ones.

Still, I don't think it's worth to add such complexity in the TP
(and, for other packages, to Weblate):

If a package wants to have the PO files for a maintenance release
on a branch, this approach would make it necessary to give the TP
the information about the branch date.

It is simpler to have the PO files in git (in a normal directory,
not a submodule). This way, the branching applied to the git repository
*automatically* applies to the PO files. No other complexity. Just
don't run 'po-fetch' on a maintenance branch — that's all a maintainer
needs to remember.

Bruno