Support for older distros

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Thu Mar 23 15:56:19 EDT 2017


> On Mar 23, 2017, at 12:17 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> On donderdag 23 maart 2017 20:11:36 CET Geert Janssens wrote:
>>> There's also gettext (see bug 759844
>>> <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759844>), but that's more an
>>> issue for what we use to build release tarballs than anything that users
>>> or
>>> distro packagers need to be concerned about.
>> 
>> Ah yes, the gettext bug. There are two actually the one you mention here and
>> Bug 745941 - Review of po Headers / make pot[1]
>> The former is about translatable strings being omitted from glade files if
>> they have a context attribute *and* we're building in tree. This bug can
>> simply be avoided by building out of tree. That however triggers a bug in
>> intltool versions older than 0.51 (which incidentally is the last released
>> version and rather old by now).
>> 
>> The latter bug started out as a bug reporting two translation issues. One
>> has been fixed, the other is actually the very same intltool issue of
>> causing absolute paths in gnucash.pot and derived po files. Again the
>> immediate solution is to switch to intltool 0.51 and keep building out of
>> tree.
>> 
>> The experiments I reported on that bug all date from before intltool 0.51
>> got released.
>> 
>> Ideally we should dump intltool completely as it's no longer maintained. I
>> did a few experiments today to generate our gnucash.pot file using gettext
>> only but didn't get it right first time. So this needs some more
>> experimentation. Frank's wiki page on this[2] has a very good summary and
>> pointers to start from. As for the gettext version to set as baseline,
>> based on Frank's summary ideally it should be 0.19.3. However if we stick
>> with intltool, this can be relaxed quite a bit as in that case intltool
>> will take care of all that has been added in 0.19. In that case RHEL/Centos
>> 7's 0.18.2 is probably sufficient already.
>> 
> Forgot the distro list for gettext:
> RHEL/Centos 7: 0.18.2
> Mingw: 0.18.1 (Mingw64 has 0.19.8)
> Debian stable 0.19.3
> Ubuntu trusty 0.18.3
> openSuse Leap 0.19.2
> 
> So moving away from intltool will be hard for now...

F23: 0.19.8.1

The issue is collecting strings and generating paths in gnucash.pot; the result files (gnucash.pot and fu.mo) from any of those versions of gettext are usable by any of the others, so runtime compatibility and usability by translators isn't affected. Since gnucash.pot need be generated only during distcheck and since distcheck needs to be run only by the GnuCash release tech (who happens to have a wide selection of VMs on which to run it), no, I don't think that we need to be too worried about supporting it on old distros and especially not MinGW. It's far more important to get it to make a complete gnucash.pot with paths relative to ${top_srcdir} regardless of where it's built so that the distribution tarballs have it right. 

Regards,
John Ralls



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