bug#24442: gettext: No PO mode for Emacs (or wrong description)

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> skribis:

> Ivan Vilata i Balaguer (2016-09-15 09:04 +0200) wrote:
>
>> The description for ``gettext@0.19.8`` (current) includes this sentence:
>>
>>     It provides translators with the means to create message catalogs,
>>     as well as an Emacs mode to work with them, and a runtime library to
>>     load translated messages from the catalogs.
>>
>> However, no output of the package includes the files for Emacs.
>
> Thanks for the report!  This happens because there is no emacs
> dependency (input) in 'gettext' package definition, so Emacs is not
> found during 'configure' phase (as can be seen in the log¹: «checking
> for emacs... no»), so elisp files are not compiled and installed.
>
> I would say this can simply be fixed by adding:
>
>   (native-inputs `(("emacs" ,emacs-minimal)))
>
> to the gettext package definition (also (gnu packages emacs) module
> should be used), and I checked it by making a variant of the gettext
> package with this line; however when I tried it on a real gettext
> package, I saw that a whole world will be rebuilt (apparently it is a
> 'core-updates' thing).  And I realized that emacs (even its minimal
> variant) will probably be a too heavy dependency for such a core thing.
>
> So perhaps it is time to make 'gettext-minimal' and to use it as the
> dependency for other packages and 'gettext' (with Emacs tools) intended
> to be installed by users (as it is done for bash/bash-minimal).  WDYT?
> (this is a question for Guix developers)

I think it’s a good idea; in commencement.scm, we’ll need to inherit
from gettext-minimal to avoid the Emacs dependency.

Most of the packages that currently depend on gettext will have to be
changed to gettext-minimal, as you wrote.

When that it’s done, we can happily add all sorts of dependencies to
gettext, including additional languages for which it provides bindings.

Sounds like a plan no?

Another option would be to hack a phase that copies the .el files to the
output, without compiling them, but I don’t think it’s as nice as the
above plan.

Thanks,
Ludo’.