Re: grub.git fails to compiler after gnulib upgrade due to gettext

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 12:20:00PM +0200, Daniel Kiper wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 11:32:18AM +0200, Olaf Hering wrote:
> > Am Tue, 21 May 2019 11:23:17 +0200
> > schrieb Daniel Kiper <address@hidden>:
> > > Could you tell us more? OS version, etc...
> >
> > Well, SLES11. But most importantly, the old gettext. Does gettext matter at 
> > all with --disable-nls?
> 
> Adding Colin who is the original author.
> 
> Colin, could you take a look at this thread?

While gettext probably doesn't massively matter at configure time with
--disable-nls, its Autoconf macros do need to *exist* in order to build
the configure script, and we need to pick a version of those macros.
This is formally a maintainer operation and is expected to be able to
rely on reasonably current tools, so I think a version that's nearly six
years old isn't too unreasonable.  The requirement in bootstrap is
necessary in order to satisfy the version of the gettext macros that's
pinned in configure.ac (having a newer version installed is OK because
gettext ships an archive with lots of older versions of its macros, but
having an older version installed won't work).

You can apply the following patch locally to use an earlier version of
the gettext macros, but we shouldn't do this upstream because it would
mean that the configure script we distribute in tarballs would use the
older version, and hence lose out on bug fixes from the newer version.
In particular, versions of the gettext macros older than 0.18.2 don't
work with Automake >= 1.14, and since that was released in June 2013
maintainers will typically have at least that version installed when
generating tarballs.

diff --git a/bootstrap.conf b/bootstrap.conf
index 988dda099..a3193a93e 100644
--- a/bootstrap.conf
+++ b/bootstrap.conf
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ SKIP_PO=t
 buildreq="\
 autoconf   2.63
 automake   1.11
-gettext    0.18.3
+gettext    0.17
 git        1.5.5
 tar        -
 "
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 08b518fcc..99f5b364d 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -362,7 +362,7 @@ AC_CHECK_PROG(HAVE_CXX, $CXX, yes, no)
 
 AC_GNU_SOURCE
 AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])
-AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION([0.18.3])
+AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION([0.17])
 AC_SYS_LARGEFILE
 
 # Identify characteristics of the host architecture.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden