I am missing something, but don't know what

[Roberto Bagnara]

Hi there,

I am in the process of gettext-izing one of our libraries
and I am short of documentation on how am I supposed to deal
with Makefile.in.in in the `po' directory and by which
process will this be converted into a working Makefile.

I am sure I am missing something obvious, but I have
looked at the documentation and browsed the web to
no avail.  I will keep a brown paper bag handy :-)

So, I have used gettextize after having read its
documentation.  The `m4' directory has been populated,
the `po' directory has been created with Makefile.in.in
(with the double `.in').  In the same directory I have
created Makevars from Makevars.template, which I have
then removed.  Since my library uses autoconf, I have
added `po/Makefile.in' to AC_CONFIG_FILES, and also added
the following lines

# Gettext.
# Look for an external libintl.
AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])
# Declare the version number of the Gettext infrastructure we are using.
AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION

The last thing I did was to add `po' to SUBDIRS in the
top-level Makefile.am (we also use automake).

Of course something is missing, isn't it?
As a result of configure we end up with
`Makefile.in' in the builddir/po directory,
but who is supposed to create `Makefile' in
that directory?  As things are now the answer
is "nobody", so that doing make at the top-level
fails miserably as soon as it cd's to `po'.

I have excavated a bit in the `m4' directory
and found AM_POSTPROCESS_PO_MAKEFILE, but I failed
to understand if and how this solves my problem.
AM_POSTPROCESS_PO_MAKEFILE seems not to be mentioned
in gettext's documentation, and googling for it
points to a message by Bruno Haible from which I
gather that he proposed a significant improvement
in the way gettext and automake can be used together.
However, I don't how far this proposal has gone yet.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks a lot,

    Roberto

P.S.: I wanted to subscribe to this list before
      sending this message, but the list seems
      not to be mentioned at
      http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo.
      Why?

--
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:address@hidden