Re: Bug#435798: gettext: Missing @MKINSTALLDIRS@ substitution in the autotools (fwd)

[Daniel Leidert]

Am Donnerstag, den 06.09.2007, 09:37 +0200 schrieb Emmanuel Fleury:
> Hi,
> 
> Bruno Haible wrote:
> > Santiago Vila wrote:
> >> I received this from the Debian bug system:
> > 
> > This is not enough information. It's impossible to analyze it with so
> > little information. Can you ask for a complete tarball, and then look
> > at the *.m4 files, aclocal.m4 files, configure files, config.status files,
> > configure.log files, Makefiles etc.? It doesn't require a gettext maintainer
> > to analyze this. Standard autoconf / automake knowledge is sufficient.
> 
> Yes, I'm sorry for that I did try to collect as much information as I
> could but still I can't locate the exact cause of this problem.
> 
> The best way to get it is to go through the following:
> 
> 1) Get the sources of Bless (http://home.gna.org/bless/):
> http://download.gna.org/bless/bless-0.5.2.tar.gz
> 
> 2) If you get a Debian unstable installed, just do:
> apt-get build-dep bless
> 
> 3) Unpack the archive, ./configure, make
> 
> And you should run into the problem. I tried it on several platforms
> (x86, amd64) but only on Debian systems. At least it was 100%
> reproducible (but I might have missed something).

Ok. Here the issue, I guess: The used po/Makefile.in.in is not
compatible to the gettext version/macros used - the gettext macros do
not define MKINSTALLDIRS anymore (at least not mine on Debian Sid :)). I
guess the reason, why you get the outdated po/Makefile.in.in is the
AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.14) macro in configure.ac, that copies the
po/Makefile.in.in from the version 0.14 into po/. But the macros were
not copied into m4/ and it seems, the macros of a newer gettext version
were "copied" into aclocal.m4 ("[..] # gettext.m4 serial 59
(gettext-0.16.1) [..]", probably done via aclocal). So the reason for
your problem is probably the way, the distribution tarball is prepared
(I tested both, autopoint and gettextize and both copy the m4/
sub-directory). So sorry, no idea how the po/Makefile.in.in from version
0.14 and the gettext macros from version 0.16.1 in aclocal.m4 came
together in the same tarball.

@Bruno: Do you know, how that could happen?

Regards, Daniel