Re: [PATCH 1/2] bootstrap: Break automake dependency on generated files. (was Re: Let’s translate!)

[Miguel <rosen644835@gmail.com>]

Hi,

El Tue, 23 Apr 2019 16:30:26 +0200
Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> escribió:
> Hello,
> 
> Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> skribis:
> 
> > This is a very good idea, but I think it leaves a stub texi that
> > won't get rebuilt because it's younger than po files. What if we
> > add a toucgh invocation to reset the modification time of these
> > stubs, to ensure make will want to rebuild them?  
> 
> Also, I don’t actually use the ./bootstrap script.  :-)

Currently it is only a call to autoreconf -fvi, but it's there for a
reason, isn't it?

> Shouldn’t we instead replace the existing %.texi targets in
> doc/local.mk with a phony target like ‘update-texi’, and then add:
> 
>   dist-hook: update-texi
> 
> ?

The procedure needed currently to a new translation for the manual is:
  1. modify doc/local.mk, po/doc/local.mk and so on. 
  2. guix.LL.texi must be manually generated somehow even though it is
  listed in BUILT_SOURCES.
  3. automake can run without errors with the rules in order to generate
  the actual translated file.
  4. The resulting files are committed.

The problem is that automake parses .texi files for the @setfilename
tag. On the other hand, guix.LL.texi and contributing.LL.texi are
generated files, and they shouldn't be on the VCS, just like neither
configure nor Makefile.in are, though they are distributed. My patch
tries to avoid this issue creating stub files that will be overwritten
with the actual content. This has the advantage of keeping clean git
status from other modifications than .po files changes.

This may sound familiar to this community, it actually is a bootstrap
problem. Running autoreconf -fvi actually tells you that that file is
missing, so that part is easy to fix. On the other hand, as far as I
tested if it does not contain a line with version-LL.texi,
version-LL.texi won't be generated.

Happy hacking,
Miguel