Re: First submission?

[Jose E. Marchesi]

> Hello everyone!
>
> I am writing to ask for advice on if/how I can make a very small,
> initial contribution to an amazing tool and community:
>
> I am building poke (I hope that I am using the verbiage correctly -- I
> read the Nomenclature section in HACKING!) on Fedora from git and
> found it absolutely dead simple thanks to your incredibly well
> organized documentation.
>
> Despite years of experience with the
>
> ./autoreconf
> ./configure
> make
> make install
>
> dance, I got caught a bit off guard by the use of autopoint and where
> to find it in Fedora. I learned that it is part of gettext
> (gettext-devel package on Fedora) and your documentation about
> Autotools (in HACKING) infers that.

We have gettext 0.18.2 listed as a build prerequisite in bootstrap.conf
(see the buildreq variable defined there.)  What is the error message
you get from running the bootstrap script?

Do the Fedora `gettext' package provide autopoing, or it is in some
subpackage or similar?

> However, I was wondering if you
>
> 1. Think that adding some information about where to find autopoint is
> useful (because it does not appear to be as common a part of the
> normal autotools that people think of [i.e., autoreconf, automake,
> etc]
>
> 2. Had any suggestion on where to put that documentation (assuming an
> affirmative response to (1).

The DEPENDENCIES file lists two classes of dependencies:

- Run-time dependencies that are also build dependencies.
- Build dependencies that are not runtime dependencies.

And INSTALL refers to DEPENDENCIES.

However, the above files are intended to be used by users of the
distribution source tarballs, not git.

Extra dependencies needed to build from git are documented in the
HACKING file (and its source etc/hacking.org).  This is in the
"Development Environment" section.

If you got an error specifically referring to `autopoint', adding a note
to that section in HACKING (maybe in the `Autotools' section?) would be
definitely useful :)

Note that if you update etc/hacking.org, you are expected to re-generate
HACKING by issuing `make update-hacking'.  That is too documented in
HACKING (stack overflow :)).

PS: thanks for your kind words, and welcome!

>
> Sorry for such a long email for so trivial a question.
>
> Thank you for welcoming new contributors and the great community you
> have built around poke! I hope I'll be able to help!
>
> Will