Re: coreutils 7.6: --enable-nls fails

[Martin Jacobs]

On Fri, 13 Nov 2009, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Eric Blake wrote:
> > According to Jim Meyering on 11/13/2009 9:58 AM:
> >> Martin Jacobs wrote:
> >> ...
> >>> Back to coreutils, with that in mind I
> >>> did change configure.ac:
> >>>
> >>>         AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external], [need-formatstring-macros])
> >>>
> >>> reads now
> >>>
> >>>         AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external], [need-ngettext])
> >
> > What about Bruno's comments here?
> > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bison/2009-08/msg00006.html
>
> Thanks for pointing that out.
> It looks like I didn't read enough.
>
> > Unlike bison, coreutils does indeed use formatstring macros (for example,
> > dd.c).  Dropping the requirement to need-ngettext instead of
> > need-formatstring-macros will cause crashes if those strings are ever
> > translated.
>
> At least with gettext-0.17, it appears to work fine using
> just-built/installed dd:
>
>     $ seq 99|LC_ALL=fr_FR.utf8 dd > /dev/null
>     0+1 enregistrements lus
>     0+1 enregistrements écrits
>     288 octets (288 B) copiés, 9,5487e-05 s, 3,0 MB/s
>
> I suspect you'd have to build in an environment that has ngettext
> support but that lacks formatstring macro support to elicit a crash.
>
> I'll probably revert my change.
>

Ok, I did play a little bit with all of that. So far,
compiling with AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external], [need-ngettext])
seems to work but gettext seems to be clever enough to ignore
incompatible compilations offered in coreutils.mo. "My" new dd
(from coreutils 7.6) gives me english messages although
LC_MESSAGES is set to de_DE.

So I've to go back to the root of the problem, that configure
fails to detect need-formatstring-macros.


Thanks for your support.

Martin