Re: delete aclocal.m4? keep generated files on cvs server? enforce specefic automake/conf version?

[Raja R Harinath]

Hi,

Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 05:55:15PM -0500, Raja R Harinath wrote:
>> Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:

[snip autoreconf/autopoint/AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external]) dicussion]

>> > All that does is stop including a complete copy of libintl in your
>> > source tree. autopoint still wants to add a few dozen files. The best
>> > solution is to not run autopoint at all, since it doesn't do anything
>> > useful if you don't want to include a copy of gettext in your
>> > distributed tarballs.
>> 
>> But, you asked for with AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
>> 
>> AFAIR, the files are all limited to the po/ directory, and they're all
>> used either by AM_GNU_GETTEXT or po/Makefile.in.in.
>
> No, there are about half a dozen files in po/ which aren't needed, and
> then there's all the m4 macros.

Sorry to keep harping on this.  I'm trying to figure out if we should
report this as a bug to the gettext maintainer or not.

Having m4 macros in the source tree is better IMHO.  You have better
control over the sources that you're building.  Also, there's a
matched set of m4/{gettext,po,...}.m4 and po/Makefile.in.in -- which
is good.  Also, with 'aclocal' 1.8, this is pretty cheap, since the
they'll just put

  m4_include([m4/gettext.m4])
  m4_include([m4/po.m4])
  etc.

into aclocal.m4.  There's no need for m4/Makefile.am, since they're
automatically distributed, and all that jazz.  The whole thing is now
very lightweight.

I do agree that using

  AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])

shouldn't pull in m4 macros that are used only for building in an
intl/ subtree.  That'd need further changes to introduce something like

  AM_EXTERNAL_GNU_GETTEXT

that we could use instead.

As to the files in po/.  Apart from po/Makefile.in.in, I see the
following:

  Rules-quot
  boldquot.sed
  address@hidden
  address@hidden
  insert-header.sin
  quot.sed
  remove-potcdate.sin

All the script fragments are used by Rules-quot.  That file isn't
directly referred to by Makefile.in.in.  However, Rules-quot is
appended to the generated po/Makefile by m4/po.m4.

          for f in "$ac_given_srcdir/$ac_dir"/Rules-*; do
            if test -f "$f"; then
              case "$f" in
                *.orig | *.bak | *~) ;;
                *) cat "$f" >> "$ac_dir/Makefile" ;;
              esac
            fi
          done

As to the utility of this whole set of files: I can't judge.  If I'm
not mistaken, they seem to be for the use of the translation team to
automatically generate simple variants of the messages that are more
suitable to an 'en_US' locale than those of the 'C' locale -- assuming
you use ISO8859-1 rather than 7-bit ASCII.

- Hari
-- 
Raja R Harinath ------------------------------ address@hidden