I'm not very happy with this fix but it is the only simple way I found to achieve this. So I'm very open to suggestions here.
Why copy msgfmt.py? Because it is not installed by default when one installs Python (at least on Linux)
Why not use GNU's Gettext? Because it is not cross-platform so I'm assuming it would fail (at least) on Windows.
Apparently msgfmt.py is not as good as GNU's. "it's not as capable as GNU Gettext, and doesn't support plural forms" ^1.
Why not use tools like python-distutils-extra? Under the hood, these tools call up the system's msgfmt function. Which might not be present on all platforms? Plus, I could not make this one work with the locale setup we've got.
So, options:
A) Merge this PR as is
B) I read somewhere that although .MO files are machine dependant. The gettext utility is able to understand them even if they were compiled with a different endianess. So option B) could be to just ship the .mo files.
I'm not very happy with this fix but it is the only simple way I found to achieve this. So I'm very open to suggestions here.
So, options:
Fixes #1338