Re: delete aclocal.m4? keep generated files on cvs server? enforce specefic automake/conf version?

[Andrew Suffield]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 03:27:37PM -0500, Raja R Harinath wrote:
> >> > All that does is stop including a complete copy of libintl in your
> >> > source tree. autopoint still wants to add a few dozen files. The best
> >> > solution is to not run autopoint at all, since it doesn't do anything
> >> > useful if you don't want to include a copy of gettext in your
> >> > distributed tarballs.
> >> 
> >> But, you asked for with AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
> >> 
> >> AFAIR, the files are all limited to the po/ directory, and they're all
> >> used either by AM_GNU_GETTEXT or po/Makefile.in.in.
> >
> > No, there are about half a dozen files in po/ which aren't needed, and
> > then there's all the m4 macros.
> 
> Sorry to keep harping on this.  I'm trying to figure out if we should
> report this as a bug to the gettext maintainer or not.
> 
> Having m4 macros in the source tree is better IMHO.  You have better
> control over the sources that you're building.  Also, there's a
> matched set of m4/{gettext,po,...}.m4 and po/Makefile.in.in -- which
> is good.  Also, with 'aclocal' 1.8, this is pretty cheap, since the
> they'll just put
> 
>   m4_include([m4/gettext.m4])
>   m4_include([m4/po.m4])
>   etc.
> 
> into aclocal.m4.  There's no need for m4/Makefile.am, since they're
> automatically distributed, and all that jazz.  The whole thing is now
> very lightweight.

I don't want them distributed at all. You can't regenerate much of the
build system without having autoconf, automake and gettext installed
anyway - and if gettext is installed, the files are present in
/usr/share/aclocal*/ somewhere. Dragging the files around in the
source tree is unnecessary duplication.

This is approximately equivalent to automake putting a copy of all the
.am files into the source tree.

> As to the files in po/.  Apart from po/Makefile.in.in, I see the
> following:
> 
>   Rules-quot
>   boldquot.sed
>   address@hidden
>   address@hidden
>   insert-header.sin
>   quot.sed
>   remove-potcdate.sin
> 
> All the script fragments are used by Rules-quot.  That file isn't
> directly referred to by Makefile.in.in.  However, Rules-quot is
> appended to the generated po/Makefile by m4/po.m4.
> 
>           for f in "$ac_given_srcdir/$ac_dir"/Rules-*; do
>             if test -f "$f"; then
>               case "$f" in
>                 *.orig | *.bak | *~) ;;
>                 *) cat "$f" >> "$ac_dir/Makefile" ;;
>               esac
>             fi
>           done
> 
> As to the utility of this whole set of files: I can't judge.  If I'm
> not mistaken, they seem to be for the use of the translation team to
> automatically generate simple variants of the messages that are more
> suitable to an 'en_US' locale than those of the 'C' locale -- assuming
> you use ISO8859-1 rather than 7-bit ASCII.

Most of them are associated with the automatically-generated address@hidden
and address@hidden locales. If you don't explicitly generate these,
then the files are never referenced and can be deleted.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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