[Buildroot] [PATCH] autoconf: use host-gettext's autopoint if available in autoreconf

Mon Oct 23 08:53:32 UTC 2017

 Hi Aleksander,

On 27-08-17 13:09, Aleksander Morgado wrote:
> Commit 7ee8ebbd813ad0a6d2392ef628c17241 explicitly disabled autopoint
> calls during autoreconf, to avoid having the host autopoint called, as
> there was no host-gettext package.
> 
> Commit 3a188b578e490f2a8b5922329b7abfae introduced the host-gettext
> package support.
> 
> This commit recovers the support for automatically calling autopoint
> during autoreconf.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Aleksander Morgado <aleksander at aleksander.es>
> ---
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I see this is a recurring issue when a package that builds from git (bootstrapping using autoreconf before configure) requires gettext processing. automake would fail as autopoint wasn't being run (disabled in buildroot's autoconf package) and therefore not creating config.rpath and ABOUT-NLS (among other things, although these are the ones automake complains about). Specifying $(PKG)_GETTEXTIZE isn't an option as that may actually update the gnulib-imported files in a non-expected way, and "touch"-ing the missing files just seems a bit of a hack...
> 
> Calling autopoint from autoreconf was disabled back in 2011 because no host-gettext package was available, but this package was added in 2013, so how about removing that limitation?

 We tried to understand what was going on (at the BR developer meeting) but we
failed :-(. Based on this patch and on the discussion in [1] and [2]
(unfortunately pipermail splits threads when they straddle a month), we
concluded that:
- the current patch doesn't work (at least not for gst1-plugins-bad)
- if running autopoint is in fact the right thing to do, then probably it is
better to replace <PKG>_GETTEXTIZE with <PKG>_AUTOPOINT.

 Indeed, as we understand from your mails and from the autopoint info page:
- autopoint installs the autoconf/automake support files for translations;
- gettextize prepares a package for translation by extracting the strings from
the source code, and additionally does the same as autopoint.

 If that is true, calling gettextize from Buildroot can never be correct,
because the extracted strings would anyway still have to be translated before
they're any use. And with autopoint there shouldn't be an issue of gettexttize
versions because it will look for the required version declared in configure.ac.
That makes us think that perhaps we should run autopoint instead of gettextize
in the places where we currently run gettextize.

 What we certainly don't want is that whether autopoint gets run depends on
whether host-gettext was previously built or not. We want builds to be
reproducible so we want to avoid building something subtly different just
because of the presence of some package which has no explicit dependency in the
.mk file.

 What we also would like to avoid is that host-gettextize becomes a dependency
of every package that needs AUTORECONF = YES. So always running autopoint is not
so interesting.

> 
> Cheers!
> 
> ---
>  package/autoconf/autoconf.mk | 2 +-
>  package/gettext/gettext.mk   | 1 +
>  2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/package/autoconf/autoconf.mk b/package/autoconf/autoconf.mk
> index e5f474c72..f1c60224f 100644
> --- a/package/autoconf/autoconf.mk
> +++ b/package/autoconf/autoconf.mk
> @@ -23,4 +23,4 @@ $(eval $(host-autotools-package))
>  # variables used by other packages
>  AUTOCONF = $(HOST_DIR)/bin/autoconf
>  AUTOHEADER = $(HOST_DIR)/bin/autoheader
> -AUTORECONF = $(HOST_CONFIGURE_OPTS) ACLOCAL="$(ACLOCAL)" AUTOCONF="$(AUTOCONF)" AUTOHEADER="$(AUTOHEADER)" AUTOMAKE="$(AUTOMAKE)" AUTOPOINT=/bin/true $(HOST_DIR)/bin/autoreconf -f -i -I "$(ACLOCAL_DIR)" -I "$(ACLOCAL_HOST_DIR)"
> +AUTORECONF = $(HOST_CONFIGURE_OPTS) ACLOCAL="$(ACLOCAL)" AUTOCONF="$(AUTOCONF)" AUTOHEADER="$(AUTOHEADER)" AUTOMAKE="$(AUTOMAKE)" AUTOPOINT="$(AUTOPOINT)" $(HOST_DIR)/bin/autoreconf -f -i -I "$(ACLOCAL_DIR)" -I "$(ACLOCAL_HOST_DIR)" --verbose

 If you're going to change this long line, please split it first (in a separate
patch) so we can actually see what changed.

> diff --git a/package/gettext/gettext.mk b/package/gettext/gettext.mk
> index ec9588f8a..08afc8fc3 100644
> --- a/package/gettext/gettext.mk
> +++ b/package/gettext/gettext.mk
> @@ -95,6 +95,7 @@ endef
>  HOST_GETTEXT_POST_INSTALL_HOOKS += HOST_GETTEXT_ADD_ABOUT_NLS
> 
>  GETTEXTIZE = $(HOST_CONFIGURE_OPTS) AUTOM4TE=$(HOST_DIR)/bin/autom4te $(HOST_DIR)/bin/gettextize -f
> +AUTOPOINT = $(HOST_DIR)/bin/autopoint

 This is not correct, AUTOPOINT should be defined together with the rest in
autoconf.mk. You seem to think that by putting it here, it will only be defined
if host-gettext is built, but that's not at all true: it is globally set.

 So I think we need something like this in autoconf.mk:

AUTOPOINT = $(if $(filter
YES,$($(PKG)_GETTEXTIZE)),$(HOST_DIR)/bin/autopoint,/bin/true)

(and remove the GETTEXTIZE support from pkg-autotools). In a later step we can
rename <PKG>_GETTEXTIZE to <PKG>_AUTOPOINT.

 Regards,
 Arnout

[1] http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2017-September/201912.html
[2] http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2017-October/205034.html

-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
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