Option to skip POT-Creation-Date

[Dreamsorcerer]

Could we get an option to skip adding/updating the POT-Creation-Date header when running pybabel extract?

Use case is that we want a pre-commit hook that updates the translations, to ensure our translations are always in sync with the code base. But, because it changes this header every time, it results in a merge conflict with every single branch.

[cburmeister]

I would love this!

We've got a GitHub Action step that runs pybabel extract on every push to master that opens a Pull Request to update the message catalog. This option would allow us to skip creating Pull Requests that only contain changes to the POT-Creation-Date (or any other header changes like Generated-By, etc).

[Dreamsorcerer]

We ended up adding a post-process step to strip out this line (and a couple more bespoke things).
So we have a script which basically runs the extract function, then runs some others functions which post-process the files. Given that we've been using it since I opened this issue with little issues, it seems to be pretty stable.

[cburmeister]

@Dreamsorcerer would you mind sharing some of that if possible? I started writing some bash to do this but it got unwieldily fairly quickly 😅

[Dreamsorcerer]

Slightly modified, but this should work (if you change project_path to the correct directory).
https://gist.github.com/Dreamsorcerer/9355fd2a308121589d7c2fa5ffaa3e8a

We ended up using the extract function in a pre-commit hook to ensure that translations were always in-sync with the code.

[cburmeister]

@Dreamsorcerer thank you!

[emibcn]

This feature would be very useful. Is there any updates on it?

[emibcn]

This feature can be to keep the creation date when updating, change it only on creation.

[akx]

PRs are very much welcome :)

[joeportela]

@akx Any interest in my PR? #999

[emibcn]

@akx
When will this be published into a new release?

[joeportela]

@akx When will this be published into a new release?

This just got released in 2.13.0!

[emibcn]

@joeportela @akx
I have just tested the PO update functionality using the new option --ignore-pot-creation-date and it looks good (no creation date differences):

What I am missing now is something similar for the POT extract functionality: