issue with i18n.merge_file

[keszybz]

I have the following rule:

i18n.merge_file(
  'org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy',
  po_dir : po_dir,
  input : policy_in,
  output : 'org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy',
  install : true,
  install_dir : polkitpolicydir)

This fails like this:

FAILED: src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy 
'msgfmt' '--xml' '--template' 'src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy.in' '-d' '/home/zbyszek/src/systemd/po' '-o' 'src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy'
msgfmt: cannot locate ITS rules for src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy.in

I have no idea what "ITS rules" are ;(

Doing it "manually" works:

policy_in = configure_file(
    input : 'org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy.in.in',
    output : 'org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy.in',
    configuration : substs)

custom_target(
   'org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy',
  input : policy_in,
  output : 'org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy',
  command : intltool_command,
  install : true,
  install_dir : polkitpolicydir)

I saw similar message in #1441 (comment), it might be related...

[TingPing]

In order for gettext to know what items to translate in an XML file it needs an its file to figure that out. intltool was a custom tool on top of gettext that did this in another method (prefixing with _). So the solution to this is writing an its file, they are very simple and you can see existing ones in /usr/share/gettext/its and http://itstool.org. They can be used locally by passing the data_dirs kwarg.

[keszybz]

Thanks for the reply. I cannot get it to work though. I copied the polkit.its and polkit.loc files from https://cgit.freedesktop.org/polkit/commit/?id=c78819245ff8a270f97c9f800773e727918be838 and installed them into /usr/share/gettext/its. This seems to have no effect — I get the same failure as before. The command that is being run is:

FAILED: src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy 
'msgfmt' '--xml' '--template' 'src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy.in' '-d' '/home/zbyszek/src/systemd/po' '-o' 'src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy'
msgfmt: cannot locate ITS rules for src/core/org.freedesktop.systemd1.policy.in

I tried changing pattern="*.policy" to pattern="*.policy.in", but that has no effect.
Dunno, I'm probably doing something stupid, some help would be appreciated.

I tried also adding data_dirs to my i18n.merge_file rule, but that results in a warning about unknown arg. Where is this supposed to go?

[TingPing]

I tried also adding data_dirs to my i18n.merge_file rule, but that results in a warning about unknown arg. Where is this supposed to go?

That might be something overlooked but i18n.gettext() accepts this to extract translations, might have to add it to merge_file() too.

. I copied the polkit.its and polkit.loc files and installed them into /usr/share/gettext/its. This seems to have no effect

Hmm, I'm not sure what the problem is there.

[keszybz]

Ha, so I had the wrong dir: msgformat uses /usr/share/gettext/its/, but there's also /usr/share/itstool/its/ used by itstool. I put the files in the second directory erroneously. Once that's fixed, translations happen.

So this almost works, but I think in current state it's not usable for us, because:

1. we need to carry the polkit.{its,loc} files in our source tree, since we want to support compilation with older polkit-devel which does not provide them. But w/o data_dirs, there's no way to tell merge_file about them.
2. I think we want to keep compatibility with the autotools based build system, so we'd need to remove the "_" prefixes by hand. merge_file of course does not remove them...

[TingPing]

But w/o data_dirs, there's no way to tell merge_file about them.

For now you can make a custom msgfmt wrapper but I'll work on fixing that in Meson too.

I think we want to keep compatibility with the autotools based build system, so we'd need to remove the "_" prefixes by hand. merge_file of course does not remove them...

Yes you should port that to use upstream gettext also.

[keszybz]

Thanks, I converted systemd to use i18n.merge_file now. Seems to work nicely.