Re: No documented way to create po/Makefile

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Bruno,

thanks a lot for the quick reply!

Bruno Haible wrote:
> Dalibor Topic wrote:
>
>
> > I'm using gettext 0.13.1, which is the latest gettext version, afaik. I
> > don't really intend to use gettext in kaffe, I just want to have the m4
> > macros and scripts needed for libiconv to be up to date, and gettext +
> > autopoint should take care of that, since those macros and scripts are
> > part of gettext.
> >
> > So I've followed the docs, run gettextize, and added autopoint to
> > kaffe's developers/autogen.sh script. The trouble is that now I get a
> >
> > Making all in po
> > gmake[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/topic/build-kaffe/po'
> > gmake[1]: *** No rule to make target `all'.  Stop.
>
>
> Hi,
>
> When all you want are the m4 macros for using libiconv, then gettextize and
> autopoint are overkill. In particular you don't need a 'po' directory for
> this. All you need are the macro files
>
>        iconv.m4
>        lib-ld.m4
>        lib-link.m4
>        lib-prefix.m4
>
> Whether you take them out of the gettext source distribution, or from
> $prefix/share/aclocal/ where gettext installs them, is irrelevant.

Ah, that's the theory ;)

In practice, some of these m4 files want to use scripts like 
config.rpath, that are part of gettext, not part of auto* tools. I only 
discovered that, when I moved the auto* scripts into their own folder 
using AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR and iconv detection started to fail because it 
couldn't find a config.rpath file.

So in order to keep all those little files in sync, I need gettextize & 
autopoint. Now, I solved my first problem, by rereading the docs, and 
interpreting a few 'should' as 'must', with respect to what files need 
to be there in the po directory or things break badly (i.e. like in the 
bug report)[1]. That's a bug in the docs ;)

Now, to the next problem: make dist failed for a few hours, until I 
figured out that gettextize doesn't handle DIST_SUBDIRS, i.e. it forgets 
to add po to it ;)

thanks a lot for your work on gettext and libiconv!

btw, would you accept fixes to *.m4 files to fix any warnings with 
automake 1.8.2? I'm using quite a few external m4 macros by now in 
kaffe, so I'd like to cut down on the warnings from automake by fixing 
the imported m4 files (using autoupdate), and contributing the fixes back.

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] Makefile.rules, POTFILES.in, and LINGUAS, I believe. I've just 
created a bunch of rather empty files (beside comments) to compensate 
for the breakage.