Re: libintl.la is missing on OS X 10.12

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

> I'm building Git on OS X 10.12. It is a Mac-mini without Xcode. It
> only has CC Tools and a few others. Curl (a prereq) is failing to link
> due to a missing libintl.la. I built GetText 0.20.1 and it is
> installed in --prefix=/usr/local.
> 
> $ find /usr/local -name 'libintl*' -exec ls -Al {} \;
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  17622 Mar 28 03:01 /usr/local/include/libintl.h
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  62420 Mar 28 03:01 /usr/local/lib/libintl.8.dylib
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  222880 Mar 28 03:01 /usr/local/lib/libintl.a
> lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  15 Mar 28 03:01
> /usr/local/lib/libintl.dylib -> libintl.8.dylib
> 
> GetText was configured with:
> 
> ./configure \
>     --prefix="/usr/local" \
>     --libdir="/usr/local" \
>     --enable-static \
>     --enable-shared \
>     --enable-relocatable \
>     --with-pic \
>     --with-included-libxml \
>     --with-libiconv-prefix="/usr/local" \
>     --with-libunistring-prefix="/usr/local"

The relevant installation instructions are in the file
gettext-runtime/intl/Makefile.am :

install-exec-libintl: libintl.la
        $(mkdir_p) $(DESTDIR)$(libdir)
        $(LIBTOOL) --mode=install \
          $(INSTALL_DATA) libintl.la $(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/libintl.la; \
        if test "@RELOCATABLE@" = yes; then \
          dependencies=`sed -n -e 's,^dependency_libs=\(.*\),\1,p' < 
$(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/libintl.la | sed -e "s,^',," -e "s,'\$$,,"`; \
          if test -n "$$dependencies"; then \
            rm -f $(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/libintl.la; \
          fi; \
        fi

The explanation is: Since you asked for a relocatable installation
and libintl.la would contain absolute file names (in the dependencies),
libintl.la has to be removed.

Generally the .la file is considered optional: Many distros don't
have any .la files under /usr at all. In other words, it's the duty
of the package which links to a library to know about the dependencies
and search for the .a and .so / .sl / .dylib files. Which is, of course,
harder if the .la file is missing.

Bruno