Re: [bug-gettext] Bug#671257: gettext: msgfmt output format prevents multiarch migration (fwd)

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Santiago,

> A long time ago, people working on embedded systems in Debian had the
> idea that it would be a good thing to have .mo files in the same
> endianness as the architecture on which they are used.
> 
> However, the saving in cpu time was too small to justify the need to
> have native endianness everywhere.
> 
> Well, the fact is that this change was made in gettext after all, and
> now msgfmt creates .mo files in native endianness

I don't know where you got this history from. AFAIK, GNU 'msgfmt' always
created .mo files in native endianness since the beginning (1995),
up until 2005-08-26, when the option --endianness was introduced.

Paul Martin writes:
> packages with localized strings fail the requirement of 
> multiarch of all shared files being identical across architectures.

Maybe the workaround is simply to exclude *.mo files from this requirement?
Have you proposed this to the Debian people?

> i.e. we would like msgfmt to create always little endian .mo files, as
> before.

You can achieve this behaviour by setting the two environment variables
  MSGFMT="/usr/bin/msgfmt --endianness=little"
  GMSGFMT="/usr/bin/msgfmt --endianness=little"
during the 'configure' run, and forcing an update of the .mo files through
  cd po ; make update-po
after "make" has run.

I think it is not too difficult to integrate these two additions into
Debian's build system (.spec files, templates, whatever)?

Bruno