[systemd-bugs] [Bug 79692] intltool and gettext required to build systemd from archive

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79692

--- Comment #3 from Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at google.com> ---
Hi Zbigniew,

Ordinarily, I'd agree with you... However:

* intltool macro IT_PROG_INTLTOOL absolutely requires that intltool is
installed
  and doesn't add any flags (like --disable-intltool or --without-intltool) to
  disable it.

* Patches to intltool to add such an option were proposed, but were never
merged:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/intltool/+bug/904647
  https://code.launchpad.net/~hiberis/intltool/bug-904647
  http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hiberis/intltool/bug-904647/revision/735

* It looks like intltool is pretty much unmaintained these days, I tried
contact
  with the maintainers (from the AUTHORS file) and got a bounce for one of the
  addresses and never heard back from the other one.

* "yum install intltool" shows it pulls as dependencies:
  - autoconf
  - automake
  - gettext
  - git(???)
  - perl + tons of perl modules
  I'm not sure if this is a packaging issue, but this clearly looks wrong.

* autoconf, automake and libtool make huge efforts so that those tools are not
  needed when you are building from an archive. Due to the dependencies listed
  above, intltool makes those efforts irrelevant by forcing all these to be
  pulled in again.

* Last, but not least, systemd's README already mentioned that intltool was
  only supposed to be required when building from git (which is understandable,
  in that case autoconf and automake will also be required) but not when
  building from the distribution archive. If this bug is wrong, then there
  is a documentation bug instead...

In any case, I agree with you that my first idea of replacing it with a custom
script (even though it was replacing ~1,500 lines of Perl that parses XML using
regexps and parses the textual .po's instead of using gettext proper with a
~140 line very well commented python-lxml script) was a bit too extreme.

I took a middle ground and simply found a way to use --disable-nls (which is
already defined by intltool, even though it is poorly supported by it) and make
it into something useful.

I'm also repeating one of the checks for intltool and disabling NLS support if
intltool is not found (as currently NLS is only used for intltool.)

The patch set is here:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-June/020504.html

I hope you agree with my points here and that the patch set will be acceptable.
Let me know if you have any questions about them.

Cheers,
Filipe

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the QA Contact for the bug.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-bugs/attachments/20140625/a41d792b/attachment.html>