Re: NO_MSGFMT

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 12:58:13AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 03:44:17PM +0200, Dominik Mahrer (Teddy) wrote:
> 
> > Hi all
> > 
> > I'm compiling git from source code on a mashine without msgfmt. This leads
> > to compile errors. To be able to compile git I created a patch that at least
> > works for me:
> 
> Try:
> 
>   make NO_MSGFMT=Nope NO_GETTEXT=Nope
> 
> This also works:
> 
>   make NO_GETTEXT=Nope NO_TCLTK=Nope
> 
> The flags to avoid gettext/msgfmt are sadly different between git itself
> and git-gui/gitk, which we include as a subproject. It would be a useful
> patch to harmonize though (probably by accepting both in all places for
> compatibility).

I saw somebody else today run into problems about gettext, so I thought
I'd revisit this and write that patch. It turns out the situation is
slightly different than I thought. So no patch, but I wanted to report
here what I found.

It's true that the option is called NO_GETTEXT in git.git, but NO_MSGFMT
in the tcl programs we pull in. So I figured to start with a patch that
turns on NO_MSGFMT automatically when NO_GETTEXT is set. But it's
not necessary.

The gitk and git-gui tests actually check that msgfmt is available.
If it isn't, they automatically fall back to using a pure-tcl
implementation. So there's generally no need to set NO_MSGFMT at
all.

But that fallback is implemented using tcl. So if you _also_ don't have
tcl installed (and I don't), you get quite a confusing output from make:

  $ make -j1 
    SUBDIR git-gui
    MSGFMT po/pt_pt.msg Makefile:252: recipe for target 'po/pt_pt.msg' failed
make[1]: *** [po/pt_pt.msg] Error 127

If you run with V=1, you can see that it's not running msgfmt at all,
but:

  tclsh po/po2msg.sh --statistics --tcl -l pt_pt -d po/ po/pt_pt.po 

So my takeaways are:

  1. You should never need to set NO_MSGFMT; it falls back
     automatically.

  2. If you don't have gettext, you should set NO_GETTEXT to tell the
     rest of git not to use it.

  3. If you see msgfmt errors even after NO_GETTEXT, try NO_TCLTK.

-Peff