At the time of this writing the Drupal.org git migration is still fresh, and I expect project maintainers and especially translation maintainers to possibly wonder about one thing. Sure, CVS ID strings were removed from all files with the git migration, but one more thing happened: all translation files were removed from drupal.org projects. As it was announced in the Drupal.org Maintainers newsletter over two months ago, translations are now to be contributed to localize.drupal.org. The drupal.org projects themselves should not have .po files committed and maintained, as that would duplicate the work going on at localize.drupal.org. The files were removed in an automated commit on each project branch by the Drupal Git User with the comment Removing translation directories. (Therefore the files are available for reference in the history).

Project maintainers should not accept .po files anymore for inclusion with modules or themes, localize.drupal.org builds these for download, and Localization update can be used to automate the download and even the update of these for releases of modules and themes. There are various advantages to this including the possibility to release and fix translations after a module release goes out, making downloads smaller and only grabbing the languages you actually need.

Translation projects themselves are kept (such as the 6.x-1.x branch of the Hungarian project). These projects should also move to localize.drupal.org entirely, but in the interest of them being available for reference (not just in the CVS read-only backup), the projects are migrated to git. These are however also to be considered as reference and not to be worked on in git.

Any questions about this transition? Let me know in the comments.

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