I've just released another xml2po tarball from unstable development: version 1.0.6. I'm pretty much satisfied with what I've got so far, and I think I'll probably stop adding features for a while, and concentrate on polishing it up. So, go try it NOW.
This is also a first version that features autoconf/automake install system and support for merging translator credits into output files for DocBook articles and Gnome Summaries.
Auto* tools support proved to be easier than I thought (in part thanks to outdated Autobook, and somewhat thanks to gnome-hello program.
I've also introduced a couple of incompatible changes, in the hope that the program will be much clearer now.
Shaun has already started a module gnome-doc-utils, and now we need to think of the best way to integrate xml2po into it, without making Python a hard dependency of gnome-doc-utils (because they contain stylesheets which are useful even if there's no Python in the system). The catch here is that Yelp is going to depend on gnome-doc-utils, and since Yelp is a essential Gnome component, Gnome itself will depend on gnome-doc-utils.
By extension, if gnome-doc-utils (with xml2po) starts depending on Python, entire Gnome would depend on Python as well. As you might guess, that's not going to happen (at least not soon).
And all that brings a wild idea into my mind: rewrite intltool to use Python and libxml2, instead of the dreaded Perl and expat-based XML::Parser. With that move, we'd drop Perl as a dependency, and introduce Python. Lovely, isn't it?