Re: gettext-0.12.1 msgfmt (built with bison 1.875) cannot read .po files

[Alexander Dupuy]

Bruno Haible wrote:
> There is a Makefile rule for generating po-gram-gen2.h from po-gram-gen.h.
> Why is this rule not being executed on your machine when you do "make"?

Interesting - I didn't notice that rule, and in fact, the rule *is* 
being executed and a po-gram-gen2.h file is created.

The problem is that I am using a subdirectory build (implicit 
--srcdir=..), so the generated po-gram-gen.h and po-gram-gen2.h end up 
in ./$ARCH/gettext-tools/src/ but the only file that includes it is in 
the source directory:

./gettext-tools/src/po-lex.c:49:#include "po-gram-gen2.h"

The command used to compile po-lex.c (`pwd`==$ARCH/gettext-tools/src/):

/bin/sh ../libtool --mode=compile gcc 
-DLOCALEDIR=\"/usr/local/share/locale\" 
-DLOCALE_ALIAS_PATH=\"/usr/local/share/locale\" -DUSEJEXE=0 
-DGETTEXTJEXEDIR=\"/usr/local/lib/gettext\" 
-DGETTEXTJAR=\"/usr/local/share/gettext/gettext.jar\" 
-DLIBDIR=\"/usr/local/lib\" 
-DGETTEXTDATADIR=\"/usr/local/share/gettext\" 
-DPROJECTSDIR=\"/usr/local/share/gettext/projects\" -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. 
-I../../../gettext-tools/src -I.. -I. -I../../../gettext-tools/src -I.. 
-I../../../gettext-tools/libuniname -I../lib 
-I../../../gettext-tools/lib -I../intl 
-I../../../gettext-tools/../gettext-runtime/intl    -g -O2 -c -o 
po-lex.lo ../../../gettext-tools/src/po-lex.c

actually puts the directory (.) where the generated po-gram-gen2.h 
exists pretty early in the include search path, but because the file is 
included with #include "" rather than #include <>, the directory 
containing the po-lex.c file is searched *before* the -I directories.

As a result, po-lex.c gets the po-gram-gen2.h (built with bison 1.35) 
that is part of the gettext distribution, but the po-gram-gen.c that is 
compiled is the one built with bison-1.875, which for whatever reason 
(perhaps related to the %token '[' ']' line?) starts numbering tokens at 
258 instead of 257.  The result, as can be imagined, is that all .po 
files get a syntax error.

> > +%token NUMBER  264
> > +%token STRING  265
>
> This is horrible.

I never said it was pretty, in fact I suggested that it would be better 
to use the generated file (I wasn't aware that the po-gram-gen2.h file 
was generated).

I suppose that changing line 49 of po-lex.c to use <> instead of "" for 
the po-gram-gen2.h include would fix this problem, but it seems that 
this is a bit sensitive to peculiarities of (arguably buggy) non-gcc C 
compilers regarding include search paths.

Alternately, the Makefile could explicitly copy po-lex.c (if not already 
present) into the build directory and compile it from there, providing 
more assurance that it will get the locally generated po-gram-gen2.h file.

But both of those mechanisms seem vulnerable to being undone by 
directory rearrangements, left-over copies of files from previous 
versions, etc. etc.  It seems far more reliable (if not as elegant) to 
explicitly specify the token values so that there is no possibility of 
getting confusion between locally built and distributed versions.

@alex
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