Bruno,

Wow.  Thank you for this great summary!  Would that all projects 
published such clear (and custom) release notes…  <3

I see that gnu/packages/gettext.scm has a nice chronological list 
of copyright lines, which does make it appear as if I'm the 
current packager of gettext in Guix.  However, the Guix project 
doesn't have this notion of (package) maintainer: everyone 
packages, fixes, and updates what they can whenever they can. 
This might change in future but it works rather well now.

For that reason, I'm CC'ing the guix-devel@gnu.org list.  I 
encourage you to add it to your own for future releases.

I'm having some trouble with the actual upgrade but I'll save that 
for a reply.

Thanks again,

T G-R

[Original message:]

Available at
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.20.1.tar.xz

New in 0.20.1:

* Important bug fix:
  - Fixed a wrong shared library versioning of libintl.so.

New in 0.20:

* Libtextstyle:
  - This package installs a new library 'libtextstyle', together 
  with a new
    header file <textstyle.h>.  It is a library for styling text 
    output sent
    to a console or terminal emulator.
    Packagers: please see the suggested packaging hints in the 
    file PACKAGING.

* Support for reproducible builds:
  - msgfmt now eliminates the POT-Creation-Date header field from 
  .mo files.

* Improvements for translators:
  - update-po target in Makefile.in.in now uses msgmerge 
  --previous.

* Improvements for maintainers:
  - msgmerge now has an option --for-msgfmt, that produces a PO 
  file meant
    for use by msgfmt only.  This option saves processing time, in 
    particular
    by omitting fuzzy matching that is not useful in this 
    situation.
  - The .pot file in a 'po' directory is now erased by "make 
  maintainer-clean".
  - It is now possible to override xgettext options from the 
  po/Makefile.in.in
    through options in XGETTEXT_OPTIONS (declared in po/Makevars).
  - The --intl option of the gettextize program (deprecated since 
  2010) is
    no longer available. Instead of including the intl sources in 
    your package,
    we suggest making the libintl library an optional prerequisite 
    of your
    package. This will simplify the build system of your package.
  - Accordingly, the Autoconf macro AM_GNU_GETTEXT_INTL_SUBDIR is 
  gone as well.

* Programming languages support:
  - C, C++:
    xgettext now supports strings in u8"..." syntax, as specified 
    in C11
    and C++11.
  - C, C++:
    xgettext now supports 'p'/'P' exponent markers in number 
    tokens, as
    specified in C99 and C++17.
  - C++:
    xgettext now supports underscores in number tokens.
  - C++:
    xgettext now supports single-quotes in number tokens, as 
    specified in
    C++14.
  - Shell:
    o The programs 'gettext', 'ngettext' now support a --context 
    argument.
    o gettext.sh contains new function eval_pgettext and 
    eval_npgettext
      for producing translations of messages with context.
  - Java:
    o xgettext now supports UTF-8 encoded .properties files (a new 
    feature
      of Java 9).
    o The build system and tools now support Java 9, 10, and 
    11. On the
      other hand, support for old versions of Java (Java 5 and 
      older,
      GCJ 4.2.x and older) has been dropped.
  - Perl:
    o Native support for context functions (pgettext, dpgettext, 
    dcpgettext,
      npgettext, dnpgettext, dcnpgettext).
    o better detection of question mark and slash as operators (as 
    opposed 
      to regular expression delimiters).
  - Scheme:
    xgettext now parses the syntax for specialized byte vectors 
    (#u8(...),
    #vu8(...), etc.) correctly.
  - Pascal:
    xgettext can now extract strings from .rsj files, produced by 
    the
    Free Pascal compiler version 3.0.0 or newer.
  - Vala:
    xgettext now parses escape sequences in strings more 
    accurately.
  - JavaScript:
    xgettext now parses template literals correctly.

* Runtime behaviour:
  - The interpretation of the language preferences on macOS has 
  been fixed.
  - Per-thread locales are now also supported on Solaris 11.4.
  - The replacements for the printf()/fprintf()/... functions that 
  are
    provided through <libintl.h> on native Windows and NetBSD are 
    now POSIX
    compliant.  There is no conflict any more between these 
    replacements
    and other possible replacements provided by gnulib or mingw.


According to [1], you seem to be packaging gettext for 
Guix/GuixSD.

I invite you to upgrade to version 0.20.1.

The packaging will need changes, regarding the new libtextstyle; I 
recommend
to package it as a separate binary package (see file PACKAGING).

When doing this upgrade, you can drop the following workarounds:
- test-lock now never hangs any more.
- expat is not longer used (already since 0.19.7).

Best regards,

           Bruno

[1] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=guix.git;a=blob;f=gnu/packages/gettext.scm