Re: Building Make out of Git: Gettext requirements

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 04/20/2013 07:00 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:56:45 +0200
>> From: Stefano Lattarini <address@hidden>
>> CC: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden
>>
>> 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;
> 
> Are you saying that, if AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION specifies, say, 0.17,
> but the person who runs autoreconf has _only_ 0.18 installed, then
> autoreconf will fail because autopoint cannot find Gettext 0.17???
> 
No.  Unless I'm badly mis-reading the code in the autopoint script, gettext 
0.x.y
comes with the infrastructure files for *all* the versions <= 0.x.y, and select
which one to use based on the argument given to AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION.

>> for more details, see the commit message for this Automake commit
>>
>>   <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/commit/?id=030ecb45>
> 
> That commit message seems to also suggest a work-around, or maybe I'm
> missing something.
> 
>> 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".
> 
> What happens if there's no AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION call in
> configure.ac?
>
I'm not sure, but I think gettext will bail out (again, this is based on my
reading of the autopoint script, reading which might be wrong).

>> 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.
> 
> Even if he is, it is IMO wrong to punish everyone because of a single
> platform, whose problem is not really fatal (static linking).
> 
That is another matter altogether, which I have no opinion about :-)
I'll leave to you to sort it out.

And to reiterate: I'm no gettext expert, and my understanding of its behaviour
might be skewed or wrong --- so don't trust any of my assertion above blindly,
without proper double-checking.

HTH,
  Stefano
 explanations above