Re: GNU gettext 0.10.39 updates po/ChangeLog

[Roger Leigh]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 11:13:21PM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Roger Leigh writes:
> > supposing my package has multiple catalogues, with several
> > potfiles.  Currently, I would need to manually copy Makefile.in.in to any
> > additional directories, and patch it appropriately to make the potfile of
> > the correct name.
> 
> Yes you will need to do that. And when the different directories
> contain translations for different sets of languages, you also set the
> list of languages in a file called LINGUAS in the po directory. That
> will be supported starting from gettext-0.11 and automake-1.5.

That is a very nice addition.

> > autogen scripts set up all of the autotools: autoconf, automake, gettext,
> > libtool and whatever other `embedded' scripts are used to build.  It's a
> > perfectly valid use.  Why should I not automate gettextize?
> 
> I don't recommend it because once you made the migration from LINGUAS
> in configure.in to po/LINGUAS, users with versions of automake < 1.5
> or gettext < 0.11 will get build errors. How can you ensure that all
> your users have the right versions of the tools?

That is a very valid point.

Our autogen.sh checks that the available tools are the correct version.
For example, it complains if gettext is not >= 0.10.38:

gettextv=`gettext --version | head -1 | awk '{print $NF}'`
gettext_major=`echo $gettextv | awk -F. '{print $1}'`
gettext_minor=`echo $gettextv | awk -F. '{print $2}'`
gettext_point=`echo $gettextv | awk -F. '{print $3}'`

test "$gettext_major" -eq 0 && {
  test "$gettext_minor" -lt 10 || {
  test "$gettext_minor" -eq 10 -a "$gettext_point" -lt 38
  }
} && {
  echo
  echo "**Warning**: You must have \`gettext' 0.10.38 or newer installed to"
  echo "create a gimp-print distribution.  Earlier versions of gettext do"
  echo "not generate the correct 'make uninstall' code."
  echo "Get ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.10.40.tar.gz";
  echo "(or a newer version if it is available)"
}

This will be updated as our build depends on newer features of gettext,
so that automating gettextize is safe.

> > IMO gettextize is the place for such behaviour.
> 
> Please, no. gettextize is a migration tool. It is *not* a build tool.

From what you have said, I don't now think that my suggested change to
gettext was appropriate, but I still believe that it is possible to use
in an automated fashion, if done properly.  I'm not using it as a build
tool _per_se_, rather as a source preparation tool, to create a
functional source tree before the build itself.

This is done not just by gimp-print, but AFAICS the entirety of GNOME
(from which I got the idea).

> > also have the option to not have a
> > po/ChangeLog: you are imposing something on users such as myself that we
> > have no use for and do not want.  It would be trivial to only distribute
> > po/ChangeLog if it existed, and allow me to do without it.
> 
> Expect to see the (indeed trivial) Makefile change in gettext 0.11.

Many thanks for doing this--I really do appreciate it.

Regards,
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh ** Registration Number: 151826, http://counter.li.org **
Need Epson Stylus Utilities? http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 available on public keyservers

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