Re: Gnulib and gettext conflicts?

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

>> I think I have two general questions here:
>> 
>> 1) Is it guaranteed that replacing the gettext M4 files with those in
>> gnulib will work with the gettext version installed?
>
> Yes. I avoid incompatible changes in the gnulib copies of these files,
> except when upgrading to a new gettext release.

That sounds good.  Let me clarify, does the gnulib files work with
gettext 0.16.1?  That's the version included in Debian for i386 right
now.

>> 2) Is it guaranteed that replacing the gnulib M4 files with those in
>> gettext will work with other gnulib macros?
>
> No. gnulib changes weekly, daily, in so unpredictable ways, that this
> cannot be guaranteed.

Ok.  1) seems more elegant anyway.

>> And of course the final question, what is the recommended way to handle
>> the code-overlap between gnulib and gettextize in a project?
>
> You should take care to run gnulib-tool after autopoint.

Problem is I have the gnulib files in git, and most developers aren't
expected to run gnulib-tool at all.

I could, however, arrange so that the some makefile overwrite the new
gettextize files with the copies from gnulib.

> It would be good if someone who has time could write some paragraphs about
> it in the gnulib documentation...

I'll try to do it once I understand the solution slightly better.  I
think the general recommendation is that users must make sure any files
installed by gettextize are overwritten by the gnulib copy.

>> Btw, I tried to install gettext 0.17 under /usr/local, but gettextize
>> didn't seem to install the *.m4 files from /usr/local anyway, instead I
>> got the lib-link file from /usr.
>
> If you installed gettext with --prefix=/usr/local, and call gettextize from
> /usr/local/bin/, it will use the *.m4 files from /usr/local/share/aclocal/.
> (Look at the variables 'prefix' and 'datarootdir' in this script.)

That wasn't my experience, although I invoked 'autoreconf' and not
gettextize directly.  Maybe autoreconf do not call gettextize from PATH?
/usr/local/bin is before /usr/bin for me.  I'll see if I can reproduce
this if it would help debugging.

/Simon