Re: Can't exec "autopoint": No such file or directory

[Bruce Korb]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:48 PM, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello Bruce,
>
>  * Bruce Korb wrote on Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 02:45:17AM CEST:
>  >
>  > I don't necessarily know that it is a "gettext" program.
>  > I certainly don't want to have to know.  Can this please
>  > trigger a message that says, "your distro packager left
>  > out the "gettext" stuff, so you are hosed."  It's easier
>  > to cope with messages like that.  Thank you.
>
>  > P.S. it is the result of running "autoreconf".
>
>  Thanks for the report, and sorry for the long delay.  Here's a cheap
>  patch.  Would this be sufficient?  It requires you to use -v aka.
>  --verbose in order to see the message.

Hi Ralf,

I confess, in the intervening 4 months, I've lost context.
I think we're speaking perl here, yes?  Then I was thinking
more like:

   xsystem "$autopoint" || error "gettext's autopoint failed";

The issue being that as a I-would-really-rather-be-ignorant user,
I'd rather have my reaction be, "Oh.  Some gettext thing failed."
rather than "Oh.  autopoint failed.  What is autopoint?"  There
is still the question, "what is 'gettext'?" but googling that will
get you something more relevant than Autopoint Pens and Pencils.

The whole point about error messages is that:
* emit one when things are not working correctly
* when you do emit one, give information that will lead even the most
  blind folks to the resolution of the problem.

I can tell by my quoted comment above that I was feeling cast adrift
not knowing why autoreconf was unhappy.

Anyway, the short answer:  No.  I'd still be getting some sort of
"command 'autopoint' not found" message without any clue about
what issue might be triggering it.  Unless I knew a priori to autoreconf
with the --verbose option.  I think the messages should lead me to the
answer without having to request verbose output.

Thank you, Ralf!  Regards, Bruce