Re: e2fsprogs-1.34 goes "boing" without gettext.

[Rob Landley]

On Wednesday 11 February 2004 18:01, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 04:59:25PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> > I'm building a LFS system without GNU gettext and the ./configure of
> > e2fsprogs-1.34 didn't notice this.  It mostly seems to build ok, but then
> > the "po" directory goes boing looking for .gmo files.  I'm a little
> > unclear what the "po" directory is for (it seems to be documentation, but
> > it's a real pain to grep for "po"...) but there doesn't seem to be any
> > way to tell it NOT to build the sucker sort of applying sed to the
> > Makefile after ./configure finishes running...
> >
> > It does, however, list you as the copyright holder. :)
>
> The po directory is for internationalization support.  Unfortunately,
> the internationalization checks in autoconf are full of twisty mazes
> which I've never been able to figure out, and I've since decided that
> life is too short to be aggravated whenever I've had to dive into
> autoconf macros supplied by gettextize.  So I've moved building the
> translation files to the very end of the build.  For people who don't
> need i18n files, everything is built by the time the po directory
> bombs out.

I've found that `echo -e "all:\ninstall:" > po/Makefile` right after the 
./configure step is a fairly easy way around the problem in my build script. 
:)

> I'd suggest finding the FSF maintainers for gettext, and send them
> your config.log as a bug report.  As mentioned above, I use the
> autoconf fragments from gettextize, and I don't have enough
> patience/sanity points to figure out what the heck is going on there.
> I know that it doesn't necessarily do the right thing if you use older
> versions of gettext, and apparently it has a false positive where it
> thinks you have GNU gettext even though apparently you don't have it
> installed.

My old build system was based on Linux From Scratch 3.2 modified to the point 
of unrecognizability, and I'm building a new build script based on more or 
less unmodified Linux From Scratch 5.0 to act as a new base to diverge from.  
I'm building packages in order, with the intention of replacing half of the 
GNU stuff with busybox and uclibc (and maybe even another C compiler and 
different build tools) later.  But my first pass is just to get LFS 5.0 
working as-is, and right now not building gettext is the biggest divergence 
I've made.  e2fsprogs is the first thing that died because of it.

> If you do manage to figure it out, my hat's off to you, and do please
> let me know so I can fix it while we try to get the GNU gettext folks
> to address the problem.

I might take a whack this evening.  I've found 8 gazillion things wrong with 
various ./configure files when trying to use the busybox tools instead of the 
gnu tools.  I remember I had to apply the following patch busybox sed to get 
glibc to build properly:

+#define LIE_TO_CONFIGURE
+#ifdef LIE_TO_CONFIGURE
+       if(!strcmp(argv[1],"--version")) {
+               printf("This is not GNU sed version 4.0\n");
+               exit(0);
+       }
+#endif

Right now I've bypassed the e2fs problem with a build script hack, and moved 
on.  Presumably, a shell script section right at the end of ./configure that 
tried to run just "gettext --version" and blanked the po/Makefile (with just 
all: and install: lines) if the resulting error code was nonzero would count 
as the duct taping over the problem, anyway... :)

>                                               - Ted

Rob