Re: CVS & Gettext

[Bruno Haible]

Akim Demaille writes:

> My question is probably a bit stupid, but, I'm a bit lost with the
> current content of Gettext.  Before, it was simple: intl/ is not to be
> put under CVS for a given project, since it's brought by gettextize.
> Therefore, just cvsignore the whole intl/.

Ignoring intl in CVS is IMO a bad advice, because:

* gettextize is a migration tool. It automates about 80% of the
  migration from one gettext version to the next one. In earlier
  gettextize versions (prior to 0.11) the percentage was about 50%.
  But anyway, after running gettextize, some things have to be
  adjusted manually by the maintainer. gettextize reminds the
  maintainer of most of these. Some other reminders are to be found
  in the gettext documentation.

* The migration from one gettext version to the next one may also
  involve changes in Makefile.in/am and configure.in. If you don't
  put the intl directory in CVS but leave it to each developer
  to generate it, the version mismatches will be *very likely*.

You may be irritated by the recent autoconf-2.53 which contains a
program ('autoreconf') which runs gettextize along with automake and
autoconf. This tool is simply buggy and broken. It should never run
gettextize automatically, because it has no way to do the remaining
20% of the job, which gettextize doesn't do.

> Now, there seems to be several gettextize files in po/ too:
> 
> ? po/Makevars.template

This file is created by gettextize for the maintainer's sake, with the
recommendation of removing it once the maintainer is done with
migrating.

> ? po/Rules-quot
> ? po/boldquot.sed
> ? po/address@hidden
> ? po/address@hidden
> ? po/insert-header.sin
> ? po/quot.sed
> ? po/remove-potcdate.sin

These are package independent files which belong in CVS, just like
Makefile.in.in and intl/*.

> ? po/remove-potcdate.sed

This file goes away by "make distclean" and is therefore a good
candidate for .cvsignore.

Bruno