Re: e2fsprogs-1.34 goes "boing" without gettext.

[Bruno Haible]

Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I'd suggest finding the FSF maintainers for gettext

That's me. Greetings.

> The po directory is for internationalization support.  Unfortunately,
> the internationalization checks in autoconf are full of twisty mazes
> which I've never been able to figure out

Fortunately you don't need to dig deeply into this maze :-) - the gettext
maintainer will do it for you when there is need to.

> I use the autoconf fragments from gettextize

All is fine with it, except for the list of files that are part of the
package, in the po/ directory:

  - It is customary to distribute a *.gmo file for each *.po file
    in the po directory. This avoids the problem that Rob was running into:
    the need to have msgfmt present just in order to make "./configure; make;
    make install" succeed.

    The preferred way for you to do this is to use the command
    "cd po; make update-po" before you package a distribution.

  - The po/Makefile.in and po/POTFILES should not be distributed. They
    are autogenerated during the configuration. They are automatically
    removed by "./configure; make distclean".

In other words, this is the recommended release preparation step:

    ./configure; (cd po; make update-po); make distclean

> I know that it doesn't necessarily do the right thing if you use older
> versions of gettext

Indeed, gettext versions < 0.10.38 are no longer recommended because they
don't work for Chinese and Japanese.

> and apparently it has a false positive where it
> thinks you have GNU gettext even though apparently you don't have it
> installed.

Huh? I'm not aware of this issue. If you forward reports to bug-gnu-gettext
on these and similar issues, it's very welcome.

Bruno