Re: NO_MSGFMT

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 12, 2017, 11:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20171112115725.c2pjhpwpcjeh4xbr@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20170813045813.i42mgwn3dmm6u52o@sigill.intra.peff.net>

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

Show 20 quoted lines

> 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