Re: Makefile.in.in fails when gettext not installed (patch)

[Yann Dirson]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 01:24:50PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Yann Dirson wrote:
> > In the .po.gmo rule, we read:
> >
> >         cd $(srcdir) && rm -f $${lang}.gmo && $(GMSGFMT) -c --statistics -o
> > t-$${lang}.gmo $${lang}.po && mv t-$${lang}.gmo $${lang}.gmo
> >
> > When gettext is not installed, GMSGFMT is ":", and always succeeds,
> > although it does not create t-$${lang}.gmo, which makes the command
> > fail, and with it the full package build.
> 
> This is normal and expected. When you make a release of a package, the
> .gmo files ought to be up to date. You cannot do this if you don't have
> GNU gettext installed. (Just like the 'configure' script ought to be up
> to date, and you need to have GNU autoconf installed to get this done.)

In case of a release, this is right.  But for some user fetching from
CVS, for example, there may not be any .gmo files available.  And the
current rules can just prevent "make" to reach the src/ dir because of
the error thrown by this line.

The "GMSGFMT=:" we get in the case where gettext is not installed has
to be there for a reason, after all :)

We got such a problem when a macosx user retrieved wesnoth this way.
He even had an old gettext installed, but this one did not pass the
checks in configure (eg. no --copyright-holder for xgettext).  BTW,
throwing stderr from these tests to /dev/null is quite annoying, since
the reason for the test failure is not kept anywhere.  It would be
good to have it reach config.log, that would help diagnosing user
problems (eg. I still don't know why msgfmt from 0.10.40 fails the
test from 0.14.1).

Regards,
-- 
Yann Dirson    <address@hidden> |
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