po/LINGUAS
One issue that was meantioned as a Gnome Goal was to switch packages to use a po/LINGUAS file.
The idea makes sense — translators only need to edit a simple text file to add a new translation to an application, rather than having to modify the configure.in/configure.ac file without breaking things. Unfortunately, the suggested way of supporting this is a pretty big hack. A better long term solution would be to use the upstream gettext macros and po/Makefile.in.in infrastructure.
For a Gnome module that doesn’t use intltool, the following steps should work.
- Make sure the module is being built with Automake 1.8 or 1.9. If it isn’t, upgrade to 1.9.
- Create an m4 subdirectory in your project if it doesn’t exist, add it in CVS and then create and add a m4/.cvsignore file (there are a number of files that will get created here by gettext that you don’t want to check into CVS).
- Mark the m4 subdirectory as the macro dir in the configure.ac file:
AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
And make sure that the macro dir gets checked if the makefile reruns aclocal:
AC_SUBST([ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS], ["-I $ac_macro_dir \${ACLOCAL_FLAGS}"]) - If you aren’t using the gnome-common autogen.sh script, you will also need to make sure that aclocal is called with “-I m4“. If you are using the gnome-common script, then this will happen automatically.
- Remove the AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT call from configure.ac and replace it with:
AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external]) AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION([0.14.1])
- If you aren’t using the gnome-common autogen.sh script, change the call to glib-gettextize to autopoint, and make sure it gets run before aclocal (again, unneeded if you are using the gnome-common script).
- Now rerun autogen.sh so that autopoint gets run. This should result in a number of files getting created under m4, and some new files under po.
- Copy po/Makevars.template to po/Makevars and customise the variables. You might want to set DOMAIN to $(GETTEXT_PACKAGE) rather than $(PACKAGE). Add this new file in CVS.
- Update po/LINGUAS from the ALL_LINGUAS variable in configure.ac, and then remove the ALL_LINGUAS definition. Add po/LINGUAS to CVS.
- Finally update m4/.cvsignore and po/.cvsignore to ignore the new generated files.
As I said at the start, this change is only appropriate for apps not using intltool, since intltool overwrites the po/Makefile.in.in file with an incomaptible version.
To get things working with intltool, I believe it would make most sense to modify intltool as follows:
- Make intltool provide some commands that are command line argument compatible with xgettext and msgmerge.
- Make IT_PROG_INTLTOOL alter XGETTEXT and MSGMERGE with the appropriate intltool functions.
- Don’t overwrite po/Makefile.in.in.
- If additional makefile rules are needed in the po subdirectory, install a po/Rules-intltool file containing them. The gettext M4 macros will include them into the resulting Makefile.