Re: Portability of libtextstyle

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Akim,

> I have been bitten by portability issues with libtextstyle: some people have
> versions that don't feature ostream_printf.

Yes. I encountered this problem too, when installing bison-3.7, yesterday.

> Unfortunately gnulib's Autoconf macros don't check for this function, so old
> versions of libtextstyle are accepted, and linking fails
> (https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-bison/2020-07/msg00030.html).  I have no idea
> where the prototype was found by the way.

The new functions (for hyperlinks and ostream_printf) are contained in
prerelease tarballs that I've been circulating, but not contained in any
release so far.

> I don't know how you want to handle this situation:
> 1. gnulib macros should be able to be told what requirements one has
>    one libtextstyle
> 2. gnulib macros always aim at the most recent "release" but checking for
>    the most recent additions in the API.
> 
> I'd go for 2, but maybe you have a different opinion.

I'm going for 2 as well, since it's the simplest, for a module that has not
many users so far (GNU bison, GNU poke, and GNU gettext of course).

> Another point is that I expected --without-libtextstyle-prefix to disable
> explicitly libtextstyle, but apparently it doesn't
> (https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-bison/2020-07/msg00037.html).

For me, --without-libtextstyle-prefix works as expected:

$ cd bison-3.7/
$ ./configure --prefix=/inst/gettext/0.20.2 && make
<fails with link error>
$ make distclean
$ ./configure --prefix=/inst/gettext/0.20.2 --without-libtextstyle-prefix && 
make
<succeeds>

> I can submit changes once I know what options you prefer.

I propose that I make a gettext release ASAP (today?), that includes the new
libtextstyle API, then you can refer all users to gettext-0.21.

Bruno