Re: Can't build gettext 0.17 on Debian stable

[Bruno Haible]

Santiago Vila wrote:
> Hello. While trying to build gettext 0.17 on a Debian stable system
> (4.0 aka etch) I get this:
> 
> [...]
> /bin/sh ../libtool --mode=compile gcc -c -DLOCALEDIR=\"/usr/share/locale\" 
> -DLOCALE_ALIAS_PATH=\"/usr/share/locale\" -DLIBDIR=\"/usr/lib\" 
> -DBUILDING_LIBINTL -DBUILDING_DLL -DIN_LIBINTL -DENABLE_RELOCATABLE=1 
> -DIN_LIBRARY -DINSTALLDIR=\"/usr/lib\" -DNO_XMALLOC 
> -Dset_relocation_prefix=libintl_set_relocation_prefix 
> -Drelocate=libintl_relocate -DDEPENDS_ON_LIBICONV=1 -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. 
> -I../../gettext-runtime/intl -I..  -g -Wall -D_REENTRANT -O2  
> ../../gettext-runtime/intl/bindtextdom.c
> libtool: compile: unable to infer tagged configuration
> libtool: compile: specify a tag with `--tag'
> make[4]: *** [bindtextdom.lo] Error 1

> make[4]: se sale del directorio `/tmp/gettext-0.17/gettext-tools/intl'
> make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
> make[3]: se sale del directorio `/tmp/gettext-0.17/gettext-tools'
> make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
> make[2]: se sale del directorio `/tmp/gettext-0.17/gettext-tools'
> make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
> make[1]: se sale del directorio `/tmp/gettext-0.17'
> make: *** [build] Error 2
> 
> The architecture is amd64, but I have not have a fast i386 machine to
> test it right now.

I don't know what you did to the gettext package to get this. gettext-0.17
uses libtool-1.5.24, and this version of libtool

  1) does not report this error (I have verified it on many platforms),

  2) has this paragraph of documentation:

       `libtool' tries to automatically infer which tag to use from the
    compiler command being used to compile or link.  If it can't infer a
    tag, then it defaults to the configuration for the `C' language.

Given that the only file name on the command line is a .c file, libtool
should either infer the 'C' language, or default to the 'C' language.

So, probably you have modified your copy of the gettext-0.17 package in
a way that breaks it.

Bruno