Re: NO_MSGFMT

[Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 12:57 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> 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.

I wonder if something like following patch could help, as anyway the
build will fail if Tcl/Tk is not installed and people often prefer
builds failing at the beginning rather than towards the end.

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index ee9d5eb11e..9789027739 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -1636,6 +1636,13 @@ ifeq ($(TCLTK_PATH),)
 NO_TCLTK = NoThanks
 endif

+ifndef NO_TCLTK
+       has_tcltk := $(shell type $(TCLTK_PATH) 2>/dev/null)
+       ifndef has_tcltk
+$(error "Tcl/Tk is not installed ('$(TCLTK_PATH)' not found).
Consider setting NO_TCLTK or installing it")
+       endif
+endif
+
 ifeq ($(PERL_PATH),)
 NO_PERL = NoThanks
 endif