Re: a saner bootstrap script

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Bruno,

On 16 Oct 2011, at 15:58, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>> If there is a bug in gnulib-tool, or autopoint that puts unnecessary
>> 'intl/' references into Makefiles when the presence of
>> AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION in configure.ac is a declaration that says there
>> is no need for local 'intl/', then I think the bug should be fixed there
>> rather than patched around in bootstrap.  Unfortunately, some difference
>> in our environments is preventing me from exploring further since I can't
>> reproduce your error on my machine :(
> 
> It doesn't come from gnulb-tool nor autopoint, but from the gnulib module
> called 'gettext'. The -Iintl option there is generally safe, except that
> coreutils activates lots of GCC warnings plus -Werror.

Thanks for the info.  Then I think the right approach is for coreutils to
use gl/modules/gettext.diff to make the gettext it imports compatible with
the gcc options it is using.  Although it would be easy enough to add a
small hook function to bootstrap.conf for now and then remove it later,
coreutils already makes use of local gnulib patches, and using that mechanism
to fix this bootstrap problem also effectively creates a builtin warning
when upstream gnulib changes (when the gnulib gettext module follows) which
has the benefit of reducing the tendency to let cruft collect in
bootstrap.conf.

I guess that my gcc is rejecting the configure-time addition of whatever
flag is causing the abort on Jim's machine... I've added this patch to my
github mirror of coreutils:

  
https://github.com/gvvaughan/GNU-coreutils/commit/d49887540fffc19cf955c7e6b0656dfed4028806

Jim, please consider pulling it into coreutils master as a better fix than
twidding Makefiles after the fact in bootstrap.conf.

> This -Iintl option will disappear with gettext version 0.19 - because
> then "gettextize --intl" will not work any more; it's already deprecated.

And then, when coreutils moves to gettext-0.19, it's easy to remove the
diff file at the same time.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)