Re: Translation files .gmo and packaging

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

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’.