Re: build-sys: minor issues

Karel Zak
2014-06-04T08:38:32Z

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 09:46:14PM +0200, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2014, at 13:27, Karel Zak wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 12:33:23PM +0200, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> > > 1. Don't track these po files in git at all. Always generate in
> > > builddir. Put them into dist only.
> >
> > No, I'm sure we want to have .po files in the git, it's part of the package.
>
> Well, I think it's nice to have copies of those files in many repos around the
> globe, but it's not really needed. And thus several GNU packages (coreutils,
> grep, tar) have chosen to drop the PO files from their version control. The
> files get fetched from the TP at release time.

I don't like it, there is many situations when people create their
private "release", run "make install" etc. -- the dependence on TP
sucks in this case.

> > > 2. Don't update them with "make dist". Add new target "make update-po".
> >
> > Well, I use "make distcheck" to generate the final release tarballs
> > and it would be nice to keep it usable :-)
>
> Easy: add another target, "make release", that does an update-po and
> then distcheck. :)

I don't think it is so easy, we don't control po/Makefile, it's
generated by gettext (autopoint) stuff and it's difficult to override
the generated targets.

It would be possible to remove "po" from automake SUBDIRS and call
the targets by "make -C po" from our top level Makefile, but it's
also not so easy because automake does not provide hooks or -local
targets for all things (for example there is no dist-local) etc.

Maybe the best way would be to maintain our po/Makemodule.am and do
not use the autopoint junk at all. Then we can:

* keeps things in $builddir
* update po stuff when it's really necessary
* fix the problem with MKDIR_P
* do not depend on ugly gettext versioning
(AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION) etc.
* make po/ Makefile non-recursive

... but it's to late for v2.25.

Frankly, all the problem all the time we have with autotools are
problems with gettext. The autoconf, automake and libtools are just
fine, but gettext is probably from another universe.

Karel

--
Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>