Re: [platform-testers] texinfo pretest

[Gavin Smith]

On 17 May 2015 at 16:26, Gavin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm trying to search the Web for information but everyone has said so
> far "use GNU make instead". :-(

If only the error message was more informative. I've got as far as
looking at the source code:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/make/var.c?revision=241280&view=markup

I haven't figured it out yet. I'm surprised that noone else on the
webpages I've been able to look at has explained how to fix this
problem.

However, I noticed one strange thing in po/Makefile:

# These options get passed to xgettext.
XGETTEXT_OPTIONS = \
 -cTRANSLATORS\
 --keyword=_\
 --keyword=N_\
 --keyword=__\
 -k__\
 -k\$__\
 -k%__\

The "$_" there leads to an attempted expansion of the "_" variable. It should be

 -k\$$__\

methinks.

When I run "make update-po", indeed the $_ has disappeared:

case `/usr/bin/xgettext --version | sed 1q | sed -e 's,^[^0-9]*,,'` in \
  '' | 0.[0-9] | 0.[0-9].* | 0.1[0-5] | 0.1[0-5].* | 0.16 | 0.16.[0-1]*) \
    /usr/bin/xgettext --default-domain=texinfo --directory=.. \
      --add-comments=TRANSLATORS: -cTRANSLATORS --keyword=_
--keyword=N_ --keyword=__ -k__ -k\/usr/bin/make_ -k%__ -k__x -k__n:1,2
-k__nx:1,2 -k__xn:1,2 -kN__ -

The $_ has been substituted by "/usr/bin/make"! This is clearly wrong,
so I'll change it, and hopefully that'll fix it for FreeBSD make.