Error making pot file.

[Christian Stimming]

Neil Williams schrieb:
>>>>A translator _still_ has to either `make pot' or `make' at toplevel
>>>>and in either case, POTFILES.in will already exist.  Right?
> 
> That is the flip side of the OSX problem. 

I think all of this can be solved once suitable Makefile rules will be 
used (it's unclear to me which part of that was OSX-specific). I agree 
that Makefile writing takes quite some time to get used to, but usually 
it turns out that all desired dependencies can actually be expressed in 
Makefile syntax.

> make-potfiles: make-potfiles.in Makefile
>         rm -f $@.tmp
>         sed < $< > $@.tmp \
>              -e 's:@-PERL-@:${PERL}:g'
>         chmod +x $@.tmp
>         mv $@.tmp $@

Yes.

> all-local: Makefile
>         rm -f ./po/POTFILES.in
>         ./make-potfiles > ./po/POTFILES.in

No, I wouldn't write the commands in the extra "all-local" rule for 
that. Instead, I suggest to add an explicit rule for "po/POTFILES.in" 
which will contain precisely this: The commands for generating 
po/POTFILES.in. (Did you say that OSX wouldn't accept that? In the 
aqbanking package we've been using such a subdirectory-file-rule for 
years and no-one complained about it.)

> AFAICT, the only way to catch all file deletions is to write a new 
> po/POTFILES.in each time make is run from the top level directory using 
> all-local because that is what ensures that po/POTFILES.in exists.

Another suggestion: Make po/POTFILES.in dependent on ChangeLog. This 
won't trigger its generation upon each "make", but upon each make when 
the ChangeLog has been edited. Since by convention the ChangeLog will be 
edited after file removals, we are on the safe side. So I propose those 
rules instead:

po/POTFILES.in: Makefile make-potfiles ChangeLog
	./make-potfiles > ./po/POTFILES.in

pot: Makefile make-potfiles po/POTFILES.in
	# add intl-scm for gnucash here
         rm -f po/$(PACKAGE).pot
         make -C po $(PACKAGE).pot

... and it's up to the reader to decide whether you add a dependency of 
"po/POTFILES.in" to the optional "all-local" rule:

all-local: po/POTFILES.in

but IMHO that's not even necessary.

Christian


PS: Yesterday you've written approx. 10 different email answers in this 
thread. This makes this discussion thread really difficult to read (as 
mentioned by Tor Harald). I'd prefer if you could compress your 
answers/discussion into one single thread, which implies answering 
several concerns in one single email answer instead of spreading them 
out into multiple emails. Maybe matter of taste, but also a matter of 
easier legibility in the whole developer group.