[XBoard-devel] some configure.ac questions/ possible gettext solution

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

I had another look at the configure.ac script.

For some reason we define X_LOCALE, RTU, DEFINED_SYS_ERRORLIST in
configure.ac but never use them later... does anyone know if they are
needed or checked in some library or can we remove those?

I also have two OS X issues. For one thing configure doesn't include the
macport dirs -L/opt/local/lib and -I/opt/local/include during tests for
gettext and other libraries, so currently you have to define those on
the configure command line. The only way I can think of fixing this is
to move the HOST check in configure.ac to the top of the configure
process. Anyone know if this is OK or if this is a problem?

The other problem is with redefining $localedir in configure.ac when
trying to build an OSX app file. We need to redefine this to a relative
path for the App, it's probably best to add a configure option
--enable-osx-app for which I would overwrite the install target in
Makefile.am to do what needs to be done to create the app. Is there a
better way of doing this?

As for the HOST check: we currently have checks for all kind of systems
in there solaris2, sunos4, sco, sysvr4... would xboard still build on
them? Is anyone still using those? Since we don't get feedback, what's a
good way of handling those? I would suggest we add something like

AC_MSG_WARN([Support for this OS will be removed in the next version, if
you are still using it, please contact xboard-devel... so that we can
keep supporting it.])

Perhaps with a few extra lines around it or an ascii box.

I also played with the gettext problem a bit and it seems that removing
the line AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.17) from configure.ac and adding all
files to git that are created by a gettextize -f would fix our problem.
I would run the gettextize everytime before we do a release and then
update the files in git. This seems to be case 2 on [1] and the drawback
listed as 2a doesn't seem to be valid, since people need that anyway to
build from git and 2b is not really an issue when using git, since
rebasing and merging is easy.

What do you all think?

Arun

[1]
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Files-under-Version-Control.html#Files-under-Version-Control