[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Compilation blues on IRIX (PR#560)

[Gaute B Strokkenes <gs234@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gerhard Killesreiter <killes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On 16 Sep 2000, Gaute B Strokkenes wrote:
> 
> > Off course, but a compile that dies might very well indicate that the
> > configure script has failed to detect the system configuration
> > properly.
> 
> You obviously know more about configure than I do :)

Um, probably not.  But the point is that configure is supposed to
gather information about the system, including information that is
crucial to the compile.  You know, GIGO--garbage in, garbage out.

The compile errors that you saw in your config.log are just part of
business as usual: to see if include file froboz.h exists on a system,
try to compile a small test program that uses it.  If it fails, then
it's not there...

> > Here we have the culprit, I think.  As suspected, configure seems to
> > think that your xgettext program is ":".
> 
> Should this be fixed? If yes, how?

xgettext is responsible for going through a set of source files and
extracting strings that have been marked as translatable, and then
producing a .pot file ("po template") which can then be used as the
basis of a translation, or more likely be merged with an older
translation.  As such, it is a program that you should only really
have to run if you have changed any source files.  Now, configure will
look to see if you have xgettext installed on your system, and check
if it's GNU xgettext.  If not, then it will simply run ":" (a no-op)
instead whenever it would have run GNU xgettext.  (I assume this is
because of portability problems.)  My gut feeling is that freeciv.pot
is meant to be distributed along with the source, and that the
makefile rule is there so that it can be updated if you have the
necessary tools.  However, the care and feeding of pofiles and their
close relatives is a sufficiently complicated subject that I don't
dare to say anything conclusive.

> BTW: If I compile freeciv with some libraries in a non-standard
> place (libXpm is not installed on my system, I installed it in
> $HOME/lib) does this make my executable less portable?

I've no idea.  The behaviour of shared libraries differs in strange
and surprising ways between different unixoid systems.  I think you'd
better ask a local Irix guru, sorry.

-- 
Big Gaute (not to be confused with LG)
Oh my GOD -- the SUN just fell into YANKEE STADIUM!!