[bug-gettext] msgfilter: Rules-quot implicity depends on GNU Sed.

[Mats Erik Andersson]

Hello there,

after arduous debugging I have established the fact that
there is an implicit dependency on GNU Sed in

   po/Rules-quot
   po/boldquot.sed
   po/quot.sed

The treacherous passage is

    ## Rules-quot

    $(MSGFILTER) sed -f ` echo $lang | ...`.sed

On FreeBSD the filter function invoked would unavoidably
be BSD Sed, which sadly fails to work properly, because it
inserts newlines like

   msgid "This sentence is not"
   msgstr "This sentence is not\n"

caused by the multibyte characters present in 'po/boldquot.sed'.
It is reasonable to expect GNU Gettext to be adaptable to this fact.
A minimal update would be

   $(MSGFILTER) $(SED) -f `...`

and a suitable preamble, including documentation.

The manual page sed(1) for FreeBSD mentions

    BUGS
        Multibyte characters containing a byte with value 0x5C (ASCII '\')
        may be incorrectly treated as line continuation characters in
        arguments to the 'a', 'c', and 'i' commands. Multibyte characters
        cannot be used as delimiters with the 's' and 'y' commands.

which serves as an indicator as to the probable difficulty.

Best regards, on behalf of GNU Shishi,

  Mats Erik Andersson