Doug Wollison on "[Plugin: PO/MO Editor] Translations are lost on plugin l10n update."

What's the recommended way of maintaining own custom translations in the face of [automatic] plugin updates?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/pomo-editor/

Oh frell, I never thought of that. I built this to maintain custom translation files; it slipped my mind that others would be replaced via updates.

As it stands I have no solution. I can add basic backup of the latest version stored in wp-content on each save, but I'm not sure how well that would work.

I'll try to look into adding some sort of diff tracker so it can attempt to re-apply the changes you made but I'm not sure how well it'll work.

Understood. It'd nice to have any solution for this (I'm not aware of any plugin that handles this right).

Automated patching can fail, what then?

Doesn't wordpress look up the .mo files in multiple locations? Could the customized .mo be placed in a path that's searched first? Perhaps with overloading the .mo lookup functions?

Then there's still the problem with synchronization after plugin update, but at least the original changes would be retained.

I'll work on a update for this week which would at least add backup saving of the file, and a check to see if the current was changed from what it was during the last edit and offer a restore/merge option.