Thanks Ben and Roberto! I have implemented the xml based catalog file format now, and it even has its own acs-automated-testing tests in acs-lang/tcl/test. What you are saying Ben makes a lot of sense and that's basically the approach that we are taking. There is currently no conflict resolution when importing XML file, the file simply takes precedence. I have moved to the more appropriate terminology import/export of catalog files. When exporting, everything that is in the database is dumped, any existing catalog file is backed up to catalog-filename.xml.org.
The catalog xml format is:
<message_catalog package_key="dotlrn" locale="en_US" charset="ISO-8859-1">
<msg key="pretty_name"> dotLRN</msg>
...
</message_catalog>
About the tilde files I will take the full blame for that and it's been corrected. Before I got commit rights I was committing with Lars's account 😊
