Re: gettextize attempts to mangle configure.in and Makefile.am

[Bruno Haible]

James Henstridge writes:

> Why must gettext act so differently to the rest of the GNU build chain?

gettextize is not part of the GNU build chain. It is a migration tool
that is intended to be run at the moment when a maintainer switches
from a gettext version to another. Please read the gettext
documentation chapter "The Maintainer's View" to get the picture. It
talks about "new files", modifying configure.in etc. in the entire
chapter.

> When it started writing to a change log, we started getting lots of
> useless messages in po/ChangeLog when people checked stuff in.

This has meanwhile been fixed. gettextize no longer adds ChangeLog
entries for files that it didn't modify.

> Not knowing which file in my project the new version of gettext is going 
> to munge next does not inspire confidence.

In version 0.11.3, gettextize will have a -n/--dry-run option that
will display which files and directories it would
create/delete/modify. Hope that will inspire some confidence.

Bruno