Re: gettext 0.18 grumbles

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Richard,

> I don't directly depend on the gettext module in gnulib, but doubtless
> it's being pulled in as a dependency of something.

Can you look where this dependency comes from? In the meantime, I notice
that 'acl' does not need to depend on 'gettext', only on 'gettext-h', and am
applying the patch below.

> There's no gettext 0.18 in Fedora, even in Rawhide and it seems 
> non-trivial to build.

Non-trivial to build? It is essential for GNU packages to be buildable
with "configure && make && make install". Did you try that? It does have
some dependencies, but you should be able to install these dependencies
with a package manager.

> My workaround has been to manually replace 
> gettext.m4 and po.m4 with the ones from gettext 0.17.

This is not guaranteed to work, even if you pass the option --avoid=gettext
to gnulib-tool.

> It'd be good if gnulib didn't replace gettext, or if gettext was not
> insane and just worked like a regular library.

As a first step in this direction, gettext 0.18 has deprecated the
"included intl directory" way of packaging. Once this option is entirely
removed - or when we decide that it's not worth supporting any more in
gnulib -, the file list of modules/gettext can be reduced to the
following:
  m4/gettext.m4
  m4/intlmacosx.m4
  m4/nls.m4
  m4/po.m4
  m4/progtest.m4
The file m4/intlmacosx.m4 then needs to be split into a gettext variant
and a gnulib variant (since we can never promise forward and backward
compatibility for all times). When this is done, the option --avoid=gettext
will be a reasonable option for you.

Then, one should look whether
  1. gnulib-tool can be made to install build-aux/po/Makefile.in.in,
  2. 'autoreconf' can be taught to not invoke 'autopoint' when the gnulib
     module 'gettext' is in use.
Thus gnulib-tool would take over the role of 'autopoint'. Further functional
alignment between gnulib-tool and autopoint may be desired.

Bruno


2010-06-03  Bruno Haible  <address@hidden>

        Reduce dependencies.
        * modules/acl (Depends-on): Add gettext-h. Remove gettext.

--- modules/acl.orig    Thu Jun  3 20:21:55 2010
+++ modules/acl Thu Jun  3 20:17:33 2010
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
 
 Depends-on:
 error
-gettext
+gettext-h
 quote
 sys_stat