title: Internationalizing a Python 2.6 application via Babel
body: <p>We're evaluating Babel 0.9.5 [1] under Windows for use with Python 2.6 and have the following questions that we we've been unable to answer through reading the documentation or googling.</p>
  
  <p>1) I would like to use an _ like abbreviation for ungettext. Is there a concencus on whether one should use n_ or N_ for this?</p>
  
  <p>n_ does not appear to work. Babel does not extract text.</p>
  
  <p>N_ appears to partially work. Babel extracts text like it does for gettext, but does not format for ngettext (missing plural argument and msgstr[ n ].)</p>
  
  <p>2) Is there a way to set the initial msgstr fields like the following when creating a POT file?</p>
  
  <p>I suspect there may be a way to do this via Babel cfg files, but I've been unable to find documentation on the Babel cfg file format.</p>
  
  <p>"Project-Id-Version: PROJECT VERSION\n"
  "Language-Team: en_US \n"</p>
  
  <p>3) Is there a way to preserve 'obsolete' msgid/msgstr's in our PO files? When I use the Babel update command, newly created obsolete strings are marked with #~ prefixes, but existing obsolete message strings get deleted.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  Malcolm</p>
  
  <p>[1] <a href="http://babel.edgewall.org/" rel="noreferrer">http://babel.edgewall.org/</a></p>