Re: gettext (accidental?)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org> writes:

> Hi, Havoc!
> 
> > GTK actually requires gettext to be installed (you can't do
> > --with-included-gettext for libraries), so we may as well just nuke
> > all instances of the "intl" directory, right? It's not useful.
> 
> I don't know much about GNOME build system, but you probably shouldn't do
> that unless you want to "fix" configure.in in every GNOME project.
> 
> Not only is intl/Makefile.in needed on CVS, but also the source tarballs
> need it as well. At least some of them are created by "make dist" so even
> if we remove all code from intl, intl/Makefile.in should remain there,
> support common targets such as "all" and "clean" and be able to copy
> itself on "make distdir" while skipping missing intl files. If you want I
> can write such minimal intl/Makefile.in, but I don't like this idea.

Well, we did actually test our changes to GLib/GTK+ :-)

The standard po Makefile.in.in requires one file from intl/ -
po2tbl.sed.in ... I just changed the Makefile.in.in to look for that
in po/ rather than intl/, and checked in the modified
po/Makefile.in.in, and po/pot2tbl.sed.in.
 
GLib installs a glib-gettext.m4 with a AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT macro that
is much like the old AM_GTK/GNOME_GNU_GETTEXT, except that it works
with this new setup.

> Another approach would be to have projects "opt out" from using intl. As
> the first step, autogen.sh should remove intl, configure.in should not
> create Makefile there and the top-level Makefile should not descend there.
> If it works then the intl module could be unlinked from that project.

I think a lot of modules never used the virtual &intl; module and just
got their intl/ from gettextize. I know that this the case for all the
modules I maintain.
 
> Note that GNU Midnight Commander will always need intl since its text
> frontend doesn't require Gtk. However, MC could switch to its own intl
> directory if the shared one is removed or stripped of real code.

The question is not whether you require GTK+, but whether you want to
support building on systems without a gettext library.  But anyways,
nobody is going to force you to do anything you aren't doing now -
though I might suggest simply getting your intl/ from gettextize
rather than using any checked in copy.

Regards,
                                        Owen