Re: patch for gettext.m4 for better included intl support

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Claudio,

Sorry for not answering earlier: on 2006-01-06 I felt that I had
to think a bit more about the possible drawbacks of your proposed patch.

> assuming full autotools and gnulib support,
> lib/, and lib/Makefile.am are completely handled by
> gnulib.
>
> lib/ itself and any other intl-aware code needs to
> [indirectly] include libintl.h, so it would be handy
> (and orthogonal to what happens in the [external]
> case) if AM_GNU_GETTEXT, when using the included
> libintl, automatically added -I $INTLDIR to the
> CPPFLAGS.
>
> This patch does exactly that: adds INTLDIR to the
> CPPFLAGS when using the internal libintl.

Having thought long about that, I think it is too risky to put this into the
AM_GNU_GETTEXT macro. This macro is used by so many packages out there.
Adding a directory into the include path that contains files named 'relocatable.h'
or 'xsize.h' can cause trouble. This trouble is not controllable if I modify
CPPFLAGS in AM_GNU_GETTEXT, whereas it is controllable if the user can do it
on a per-directory basis.

The gettext documentation, node "Makefile.in in src", says that the intl directory
can be unconditionally added to the include path. So let's do that in gnulib's generated
Makefile.am. I propose to add to modules/gettext, section 'Makefile.am', the line
  CPPFLAGS += $(top_builddir)/intl
Or to add to modules/gettext, section 'configure.ac', the line
  CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS ${top_builddir}/intl"
This will only affect gnulib users. Is this acceptable to you?

Bruno