Re: coreutils 7.6: --enable-nls fails

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake wrote:
> According to Jim Meyering on 11/13/2009 9:58 AM:
>> Martin Jacobs wrote:
>> ...
>>> Back to coreutils, with that in mind I
>>> did change configure.ac:
>>>
>>>         AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external], [need-formatstring-macros])
>>>
>>> reads now
>>>
>>>         AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external], [need-ngettext])
>
> What about Bruno's comments here?
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bison/2009-08/msg00006.html

Thanks for pointing that out.
It looks like I didn't read enough.

> Unlike bison, coreutils does indeed use formatstring macros (for example,
> dd.c).  Dropping the requirement to need-ngettext instead of
> need-formatstring-macros will cause crashes if those strings are ever
> translated.

At least with gettext-0.17, it appears to work fine using
just-built/installed dd:

    $ seq 99|LC_ALL=fr_FR.utf8 dd > /dev/null
    0+1 enregistrements lus
    0+1 enregistrements écrits
    288 octets (288 B) copiés, 9,5487e-05 s, 3,0 MB/s

I suspect you'd have to build in an environment that has ngettext
support but that lacks formatstring macro support to elicit a crash.

I'll probably revert my change.