Configure script doesn't check for msgfmt?

[tsally]

Hi,

I believe the configure script does not check for the presence of msgfmt. The configure script completed and the make failed with the following:

/bin/sh: 2: msgfmt: not found
make: *** [po/de.gmo] Error 127

I solved this with sudo apt-get install gettext, after which compilation successfully completed.

Relevant platform information:

tsally@jefferson:~/src/fish-shell$ uname -a
Linux jefferson 3.2.0-36-generic-pae #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 8 22:01:06 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

tsally@jefferson:~/src/fish-shell$ autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.68

Please let me know if I can provide any additional information.

[gf3]

+1

[zanchey]

Could you include the output of config.log? The lines around checking for library containing gettext checking for gettext are probably the important ones.

[zanchey]

OK, never mind. The problem is that the gettext family of library calls (which is what the configure script checks for) comes from glibc, but the msgfmt program comes from gettext (and is not included in gettext-base on e.g. Ubuntu).

I am happy to knock up a patch, but should the configure script disable gettext support if msgfmt is not found, or just complain and exit with an error?

[ridiculousfish]

It should disable it. I would be very happy if fish could build and run without requiring gettext.

[zanchey]

Is there much else to do than to add the necessary almost-noops in fallback.cpp?

[zanchey]

Is there much else to do than to add the necessary almost-noops in fallback.cpp?

[ridiculousfish]

I haven't investigated, but I imagine that there would be a macro output to config.h, which we would use to create the no-op macros and functions, and that would be sufficient.

We should verify that the changes to the configure script are compatible with the ancient version of autoconf shipped with OS X - I can do that.

[zanchey]

I suspect building without gettext did actually work at some point in the past, as the functions are all already written. There was a little bit of configure magic that needed hooking up, but I think the commits at https://github.com/zanchey/fish-shell/compare/kill-gettext do the trick.

I have tested on

• FreeBSD without gettext
• FreeBSD with gettext
• Debian with just gettext-base (i.e. no msgfmt),
• Debian with gettext

I don't think there's too much new Autoconf magic, so it should work okay on OS X, but I haven't checked.

[ridiculousfish]

Merged here:

To git@github.com:fish-shell/fish-shell.git
94b1d58..bf282e9 master -> master

Thanks for your conscentious testing. Leaving this open to remind me to check on 10.6.

[ridiculousfish]

Things seem fine on SnowLeopard. Closing.