Strange failure during de_CH.po generation with make -j

[Xinhui Yang]

Hi,

Recently we observed a strange failure while packaging GRUB 2.12 for
our distro. The translation file generation process might fail if
parallelism was enabled (e.g. `make -j', or with `-j16' and larger
numbers).

We found that the build always failed whilst generating de_CH
translation data from de.po, complaining about syntax errors or a
premature EOF whilst processing the strings. The exact line numbers
msgfilter complained about were random. If we remove de_CH from
linguas.sh, the build passes every time, even with parallelism
enabled - of course, with parallelism disabled, we did not observe
this issue.

This issue has been reproduced on:

- AOSC OS, the aforementioned distro that I work on.
- Debian Bookworm.

I propose the following solutions:

- Tell the distro maintainers not to use -j.
- Patch po/gettext-patches to add a .NOTPARALLEL directive in Makefile.in.in.

We have opted to temporarily disable parallelism in po/Makefile, since we
could not find the culprit to this issue.

Regards,
Xinhui