build fails on UNIX or other system without AppStream

[despair86]

related issue but on Linux: bilelmoussaoui/nautilus-git#25
this appears to be the cause mesonbuild/meson#1565

[3/43] Generating uk.co.ibboard.cawbird.appdata.xml_data_merge with a custom command.
FAILED: data/uk.co.ibboard.cawbird.appdata.xml
/usr/bin/meson --internal msgfmthelper ../data/uk.co.ibboard.cawbird.appdata.xml.in data/uk.co.ibboard.cawbird.appdata.xml xml ../data/../po/
msgfmt: cannot locate ITS rules for ../data/uk.co.ibboard.cawbird.appdata.xml.in

otherwise works fine on my Sun 🎉

[IBBoard]

What version of Meson are you using? And what command did you run?

I've got builds running on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS and openSUSE and never seen that message. And if I'm reading the Meson bug correctly then it should "just work" since 2017!

Unless there's a dependency that most distros just have (or pull in) by default that yours hasn't?

[despair86]

$ meson --version
0.51.2
$ uname -a
SunOS sun-pc 5.11 illumos-e7b6645677 i86pc i386 i86pc
$ meson build --buildtype release disable-spellcheck
...

distribution does not package libappstream or appstream-glib (which is where the ITS rules for msgfmt are placed)

if the install rule for data/uk.co.ibboard.cawbird.appdata.xml is removed (install = false and target removed manually in build.ninja) cawbird works fine without it

[IBBoard]

Odd. I have libappstream4 installed, but not appstream-glib or the devel package. The package only provides the .so file, news and license, so I've not got the "its" rules either (only fontconfig, gschema and gtk4builder under /usr/share/gettext/its/) but it builds without issue.

I'll have to look in to it a bit more and see what can be done.