Comment 25 for bug 1707898

This is my test on artful:

I made this modification:

$ cat /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.locale1.policy | grep '"systemd"' -A 1
                <message gettext-domain="systemd">Authentication is required to set the system locale.</message>
                <defaults>

i.e. I dropped the inline translations for that message.

Then I renamed /usr/share/gettext/its/polkit.{its,loc}:

$ ls /usr/share/gettext/its/polkit*
/usr/share/gettext/its/polkit.its.bak /usr/share/gettext/its/polkit.loc.bak

I switched to a non-admin user and run:

localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

and the prompt was translated dynamically. So yes, they are probably only used at build time in some sense.

But people use xgettext() and similar tools manually too, and if we move those files to libpolkit-gobject-1-dev, you'd need to install that package in order to extract messages from polkit files.