Translation files .gmo and packaging

Translation files .gmo and packaging

[Simon Tournier]

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

Re: Translation files .gmo and packaging

[Andy Tai]

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
>
>

Re: Translation files .gmo and packaging

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

> 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?

In pure bootstrappable spirit, we should view tarballs as byproducts,
not source, and thus depend only on the actual source (VCS repo).

This has been discussed a few times here and there’s consensus I think
that this is The Way to Go (I remember a thread started by Maxime Devos
on this topic months ago).

However, a practical detail: most GNU packages ship generated build
machinery; building those packages from source means adding dependencies
on Autoconf & co., which may prove to be tedious deep in the dependency
graph.

So for now, I think we should avoid tarballs produced by autotools &
co. whenever doing so is simple, while postponing that for more crucial
packages.

In the case of ice-wm, it would seem that there’s the extra difficulty
that source is scattered in different places (where are the .po files?),
so perhaps that’s a case where you may want to use the tarball, possibly
discussing with upstream to see if we can do better.

HTH,
Ludo’.

Re: Translation files .gmo and packaging

[zimoun]

Hi Ludo,

On Mon, 30 Jan 2023 at 22:59, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> In the case of ice-wm, it would seem that there’s the extra difficulty
> that source is scattered in different places (where are the .po files?),
> so perhaps that’s a case where you may want to use the tarball, possibly
> discussing with upstream to see if we can do better.

Well, v3 [1] is an attempt.

1: <http://issues.guix.gnu.org/msgid/20230128082221.20893-1-atai@atai.org>


Cheers,
simon