Support for older distros

[John Ralls]

> On Mar 23, 2017, at 1:52 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> 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 ?

That and getting gettext to do what we want.

Regards,
John Ralls