Re: [bug-gettext] .twjr=awk support

[Karl Berry]

    other hand, I fear that that might confuse wrappers like intltool and
    might break backward compatibility.

Yes, I agree.  

    So, my current idea is to have a separate file listing options,
    analogous to .gitattributes:

Sounds reasonable.

    where glob patterns are allowed to avoid repetition.

Allowed but required?  Not sure if this would come for free.  E.g., a
particular foo.cpp file might have a special keyword that bar.cpp (or
*.cpp in general) does not.  This actually happens in Texinfo, although
thankfully in our cases it does not hurt to define our special keyword
for all files.


Also:

    *.cpp --keyword ...

I wonder about adding a keyword to the beginning of the line, like
file *.cpp --keyword ...

That way, if later on it turns out to be useful to define other aspects
of gettext configuration in the same file, another keyword could be used
and it would all be nicely parallel.


Which makes me think of another possibility, though I'm not sure if it
makes sense: maybe such additional config could be optionally added to
Makevars, which users are already (supposed to) edit.  Instead of
creating a separate/second file.

    and a user needs to check if the option is available.

Maybe the user could declare at some level (AM_GNU_GETTEXT, Makevars, ?)
that such an options file is used and then the pot-update code can check
that (a) the file exists, and (b) the version of xgettext is sufficient.

Ultimately, clearly the hope would be that po/Makefile.in.in would
remain completely identical between different projects.

Thanks,
Karl