bug#24442: gettext: No PO mode for Emacs (or wrong description)

[Alex Kost]

Ivan Vilata i Balaguer (2016-09-15 09:04 +0200) wrote:

> The description for address@hidden (current) includes this sentence:
>
>     It provides translators with the means to create message catalogs,
>     as well as an Emacs mode to work with them, and a runtime library to
>     load translated messages from the catalogs.
>
> However, no output of the package includes the files for Emacs.

Thanks for the report!  This happens because there is no emacs
dependency (input) in 'gettext' package definition, so Emacs is not
found during 'configure' phase (as can be seen in the log¹: «checking
for emacs... no»), so elisp files are not compiled and installed.

I would say this can simply be fixed by adding:

  (native-inputs `(("emacs" ,emacs-minimal)))

to the gettext package definition (also (gnu packages emacs) module
should be used), and I checked it by making a variant of the gettext
package with this line; however when I tried it on a real gettext
package, I saw that a whole world will be rebuilt (apparently it is a
'core-updates' thing).  And I realized that emacs (even its minimal
variant) will probably be a too heavy dependency for such a core thing.

So perhaps it is time to make 'gettext-minimal' and to use it as the
dependency for other packages and 'gettext' (with Emacs tools) intended
to be installed by users (as it is done for bash/bash-minimal).  WDYT?
(this is a question for Guix developers)

> One solution (please note that I'm very new to Guix) may be to provide
> an output for the Emacs goodies, another one would be removing the
> reference to the Emacs mode in the description until it's actually
> there.`;)`

I think a special output is not needed, as the resulting *.el[c] files
weigh much less than 1MB.

¹ http://hydra.gnu.org/log/1zxiq8gq3gs29j0gha5ciyklfafkkrmd-gettext-0.19.8

-- 
Alex