Support for older distros

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 23 maart 2017 20:56:19 CET John Ralls wrote:
> > 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

Thanks. As with the other lists I skipped fast moving distros.
> 
> 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)
:D Lovely

> , 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.

Going from the single bugfix that went into intltool 0.51 this is an intltool 
issue and not a gettext one. So if we move away from intltool that should be a 
non-issue.

So it's just a matter of preventing users from running gettext (and by 
extension make/ninja pot and other related make/ninja commands) if the 
available version is too old ?

Geert