Re: e2fsprogs-1.34 goes "boing" without gettext.

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 04:59:25PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> I'm building a LFS system without GNU gettext and the ./configure of 
> e2fsprogs-1.34 didn't notice this.  It mostly seems to build ok, but then the 
> "po" directory goes boing looking for .gmo files.  I'm a little unclear what 
> the "po" directory is for (it seems to be documentation, but it's a real pain 
> to grep for "po"...) but there doesn't seem to be any way to tell it NOT to 
> build the sucker sort of applying sed to the Makefile after ./configure 
> finishes running...
> 
> It does, however, list you as the copyright holder. :)

The po directory is for internationalization support.  Unfortunately,
the internationalization checks in autoconf are full of twisty mazes
which I've never been able to figure out, and I've since decided that
life is too short to be aggravated whenever I've had to dive into
autoconf macros supplied by gettextize.  So I've moved building the
translation files to the very end of the build.  For people who don't
need i18n files, everything is built by the time the po directory
bombs out.

I'd suggest finding the FSF maintainers for gettext, and send them
your config.log as a bug report.  As mentioned above, I use the
autoconf fragments from gettextize, and I don't have enough
patience/sanity points to figure out what the heck is going on there.
I know that it doesn't necessarily do the right thing if you use older
versions of gettext, and apparently it has a false positive where it
thinks you have GNU gettext even though apparently you don't have it
installed.

If you do manage to figure it out, my hat's off to you, and do please
let me know so I can fix it while we try to get the GNU gettext folks
to address the problem.  

                                                - Ted