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

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gaute B Strokkenes <gs234@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

> > > 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.)

[Above is background, I think this is the main point:]

>  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. 

Agreed.  I think the situation is similar to autoconf & co: if you are
using a release tarball (as created by 'make dist', which we do for
stable and beta versions, but not eg CVS snapshots), then configure
and make should work properly on all systems, because freeciv.pot is
included.  If you are doing development and need to regenerate
freeciv.pot, then you need the appropiate GNU tools (in this case, GNU
xgettext).  Since freeciv.pot is not included in CVS, this applies to
using the CVS version too.

This is the reason why we put configure and Makefile.in etc CVS -- so
that people _don't_ specifically need autoconf etc to compile the CVS
version of freeciv.  Putting freeciv.pot in CVS would be very tedious
though, since it changes so frequently.  But if you grap a copy of
freeciv.pot from ftp (see link on http://www.freeciv.org/l10n.phtml)
then you should be able to compile from CVS.  (Or alternatives such as
configuring with --disable-nls, as previous mentioned.)

-- David