gettext-0.11.1 -- configure/make deficiencies (bugs)

[Peter Breitenlohner]

Hi,

I just fetched and installed gettext-0.11.1.
In doing so I encountered the following problems:

1. doing "make install-strip" failed because it tried to strip the scripts
'user-email' and 'project-id' (due to a longstanding bug in the outdated
autoconf-2.13).

2. One of the tests (msgunfmt-3) fails when run outside the
sourcetree (VPATH).

1&2. are fixed by the attached patch (although 1 will automatically disappear
with a newer version of autoconf).

3. I tried to run
        make DESTDIR=<some_where> all check install
but then all 18 rpath-tests failed. I tried to fix this but without sucess.

In my attemts to fix this I had modified tests/Makefile.am, but then
configure/make complained that I need to update automake (from my current
version 1.6 to what???), this seems to be an automake-1.4/1.6
incompatibility. PLEASE investigate this and/or report it to the automake
maintainers.

4. I have emacs and automake installed with --prefix=/usr/local, but wanted
to install gettext with --prefix=/usr. This just didn't work in two respects:

(a) gettext's files were installed in /usr/share/aclocal/ and not in
/usr/local/share/aclocal/ where automake will look for them

(b) the files po-mode.el and po-mode.elc were installed in
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/ and not in /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/
where emacs will look for them. This can probably be overwritten with
--lispdir=..., but the necessity to do so is ridiculous because the emacs
search paths are first enquired from emacs, which returns (among other
things)
        /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp
and then converted into
        ${datadir}/emacs/site-lisp
but ${datadir} then depends on the prefix for gettext, not the one for
emacs.

This is really BAD. I always had the impression that the choice between
--prefix=/usr/local and --prefix=/usr can be made for each package
independently!

regards
Peter Breitenlohner <address@hidden>

gettext-0.11.1-patch
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