Re: Gnulib and gettext conflicts?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Simon,

> So I'd like to make sure the gnulib copy is
> used rather than the gettext version.

I'm sorry that you too have been bitten by this problem. Can someone help
unify gnulib-tool, gettextize, and libtoolize into a single tool?

> The following files are installed by
> gettextize into m4/ and is also distributed via gnulib:
> 
> codeset.m4
> gettext.m4
> glibc21.m4
> glibc2.m4
> iconv.m4
> intdiv0.m4
> intldir.m4
> intl.m4
> intmax.m4
> inttypes_h.m4
> inttypes-pri.m4
> lcmessage.m4
> lib-ld.m4
> lib-link.m4
> lib-prefix.m4
> lock.m4
> longlong.m4
> nls.m4
> po.m4
> printf-posix.m4
> progtest.m4
> size_max.m4
> stdint_h.m4
> uintmax_t.m4
> ulonglong.m4
> visibility.m4
> wchar_t.m4
> wint_t.m4
> xsize.m4

Yes, this is approximately the list.

> I think I have two general questions here:
> 
> 1) Is it guaranteed that replacing the gettext M4 files with those in
> gnulib will work with the gettext version installed?

Yes. I avoid incompatible changes in the gnulib copies of these files,
except when upgrading to a new gettext release.

> 2) Is it guaranteed that replacing the gnulib M4 files with those in
> gettext will work with other gnulib macros?

No. gnulib changes weekly, daily, in so unpredictable ways, that this
cannot be guaranteed.

> And of course the final question, what is the recommended way to handle
> the code-overlap between gnulib and gettextize in a project?

You should take care to run gnulib-tool after autopoint.

It would be good if someone who has time could write some paragraphs about
it in the gnulib documentation...

> Btw, I tried to install gettext 0.17 under /usr/local, but gettextize
> didn't seem to install the *.m4 files from /usr/local anyway, instead I
> got the lib-link file from /usr.

If you installed gettext with --prefix=/usr/local, and call gettextize from
/usr/local/bin/, it will use the *.m4 files from /usr/local/share/aclocal/.
(Look at the variables 'prefix' and 'datarootdir' in this script.)

Bruno