Re: Building Make out of Git: Gettext requirements

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 04/20/2013 05:44 PM, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-04-20 at 13:50 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Do we really need to require 0.18.1 or can this restriction be lifted?
>> I hacked configure.ac to require 0.17, and didn't see any problems
>> afterwards.
> 
> You can see this bug:
> 
> http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?37307
> 
> I confess I didn't get a satisfactory answer to my question, of why the
> minimum version in configure.ac must be changed.  It seems to me that if
> I build the make distribution tarball with a newer version of gettext,
> regardless of the minimum version specified in configure.ac, it should
> be good enough.
>
I'm not sure of this -- I believe that gettext tries to use the data files
for the version actually specified in AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION, even when a
more modern gettext is being used; for more details, see the commit message
for this Automake commit

  <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/commit/?id=030ecb45>

This seems confirmed by the Gettext manual:

    AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION (in gettext.m4)
    --------------------------------------
    The AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION macro declares the version number of the
    GNU gettext infrastructure that is used by the package.

See? There is no mention of "minimal required version number" --- it only
speaks about "*the* version number".

Not sure if and how this is relevant for your situation, but might be something
to consider.

> However, Brad was clear that he believed that the minimum version MUST
> be increased in configure.ac in order to get the benefits.
>
I believe he's right, in light of the above.

> I was going
> to build with the new version anyway so I just changed it.
> 
> If this is a problem we can get back into it and ask Brad for more
> clarification, and maybe check on the OpenBSD lists for details.
> 

Me goes back on lurking now...

Regards,
  Stefano