Re: Translation files .gmo and packaging

[Andy Tai <atai@atai.org>]

Hi, I wonder how is this different from the common practice of
projects using GNU autotools, which the project in question is also
one, that the Makefile.in was generated from Makefile.am, but the
tarball may contain the "generated" Makefile.in and configure and Guix
won't bother to re-generate these two files.

In addition, git is a late comer to the free software world and tar
ball releases have been the preferred form of "sources" from the days
before git; whether git repo for the sources exists would not have
mattered, if the canonical source of the project source code is the
official release tarball.


> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2023 12:39:30 +0100
> From: Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>
> To: guix-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Translation files .gmo and packaging
> Message-ID: <86h6wdsex9.fsf@gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> Hi,
>
> The submission patch#61010 [1] relies on the release archive:
>
>     https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/download/3.3.0/icewm-3.3.0.tar.lz
>
> and this archive contains the generated .gmo files.  However, these
> files are not in the archive:
>
>     https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/archive/refs/tags/3.3.1.tar.gz
>
> neither in the Git repository:
>
>     https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/tree/3.3.0/po
>
>
> The question is:
>
> What is the usual way to deal with these generated files?  Can we
> distribute them although it is not the Guix project that generates them
> from source?
>
> >From my understanding, the package should generate these files if
> possible and not rely on already generated ones.
>
> 1: <http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/61010>
>
> Cheers,
> simon
>
>