xgettext (was: more Fun With Encoding)

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Chris,

Am Montag, 10. Oktober 2005 00:40 schrieb Chris Shoemaker:
> > > > > xgettext appears to now support finding strings in Lisp files. 
> > >
> > > From looking at xgettext's NEWS file, I gather that this has been
> > > supported since Version 0.14.2 - February 2005.  IIUC, the only people
> > > who need to run xgettext are the packagers, i.e. the developers.  So,
> > > is this version sufficiently old enough that people are in favor of
> > > dropping our "use perl to collect Scheme strings into C file so
> > > xgettext can find them"-trick?
> >
> > As for my development system, which is suse9.3 so already quite recent
> > (its successor suse10.0 was just released this week), the bundled
> > xgettext is 0.14.1. I would therefore prefer sticking with the old method
> > for something like the upcoming 6 more months.
>
> What does 0.14.1 do with .scm files?  output nothing? fail loudly?
> output crap?

Actually I'm confused how you call xgettext. I thought the rules for calling 
xgettext should all be wrapped in some Makefiles. So in order to have the po 
template po/gnucash.pot created, I would expect that people should do

 cd po
 rm gnucash.pot
 make gnucash.pot

and everything else is done automatically (and in reality you would create 
intl-scm/guile-string.c before that just the same way). As it turns out, the 
relevant decision on how the scheme files are handled is done in 
intltool-update and intltool-extract (which will then call xgettext on a 
subset of the POTFILES.in files) which are from the package 
"intltool" (0.33.3 at suse9.3). In intltool-0.33.3 scheme file are not (yet) 
supported in the way we expect them to be. There is no particular error 
message, but simply none of the strings will make it into gnucash.pot.

You *could* change all that. However, since the package is working quite well 
with this intltool helpers, I wouldn't see the immediate benefit, and I would 
therefore propose to stick with this intltool way for another 6 months. Maybe 
reconsider that after 2.0 is out.

Christian