The extractor.php file sat there in the translation templates project waiting to get criticized to death for being hard for beginners and even people experienced with Drupal. Fortunately Raimund Bauer come along to actually disturb the waters and start to build a web based interface on top of the extraction functionality. For maintainability reasons, this resulted in the extractor.php script getting move to the resulted project.
Therefore first I would like to annonce, that extractor.php become potx-cli.php (which requires potx.inc to execute). This potx.inc file serves as the shared code base between the command line interface (CLI) script and the module. Nothing was changed in the command line interface yet, but the ugly "overhttp" mode of extractor.php was removed in favor of potx.module providing a hopefully better interface soon. So there is also a web based frontend in development to help translators extract strings from Drupal modules. But since the web interface currently largely reflects what Raimund needs (and what I tried to quickly clean up around there), we would really welcome suggestions, ideas and especially testers for the project. You can grab the latest 5.x development snapshot from here: http://drupal.org/project/potx