[libvirt] FYI: Getting rid of gettextize cruft

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 09:15:10AM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 05/09/2012 08:52 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > In libguestfs, we recently got rid of gettextize (or rather, we got
> > rid of the po/Makefile* cruft that gettextize produces).
> > 
> > We replaced it with a very simple 100 line Makefile.am which does the
> > same thing, without the many bugs and problems caused by gettextize
> > and autopoint:
> > 
> > Final po/Makefile.am:
> > 
> > https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/75514ab57a06e534f26698fe1725ca29b966c3ad/po/Makefile.am
> > 
> > Patches to remove gettextize cruft:
> > 
> > https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/6aa95e87c1f259589ff9c7812707e4b30b8f6fd7
> > https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/75514ab57a06e534f26698fe1725ca29b966c3ad
> 
> Off-topic to your question, but I notice you are using 'echo -n' in your
> configure.ac.  That is not portable; the portable replacement is
> AS_ECHO_N([message]).

Thanks, I'll fix this.

> > 
> > Is this something that libvirt would be interested in?
> 
> Is your bootstrap script still calling autopoint?  See line 39 of
> https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/d0ec0b4c8/bootstrap

Coincidentally I just fixed this very bug.

> Also, it looks like libguestfs' boostrap is not synced from gnulib, but
> hand-rolled.  Right now, libvirt is merely relying on gnulib's
> bootstrap, and gnulib is doing a decent job with calling autopoint (and
> not gettextize).  I just recently fixed gnulib to allow us to continue
> to use gettext 0.17 (for RHEL 6.2 and RHEL 5), rather than gnulib's
> attempt to force us to upgrade to 0.18.x, but I guess that does mean
> that we are stuck with a crusty Makefile.in.in from autopoint that
> doesn't understand all of the GNU Coding Standards makefile conventions.
>  But you're the first person to mention ripping it all out.  Maybe it's
> worth proposing this upstream with gnulib, because I don't really see a
> point in making libvirt a one-off special case from the gnulib conventions.

I'll just note that autopoint didn't work for us (because for some
reason RHEL 6's autopoint removes the -V option, apparently it's
deliberate).

Full saga here:

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/genuine-fragment-from-rhel-spec-file/

Anyway, I got rid of the whole lot, and now I'm much happier.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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