If you have a project that uses intltool, you should be trying to get rid of it in favor of using AM_GNU_GETTEXT instead. Matthias wrote a nice post about this recently. Fortunately, it’s very easy to do. I decided to port gnome-chess during some downtime today, and ran into only one tough problem:
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/mcatanzaro/.cache/jhbuild/build/gnome-chess/po'
Makefile:253: *** target pattern contains no '%'. Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/mcatanzaro/.cache/jhbuild/build/gnome-chess/po'
This was pretty inscrutable, but I eventually discovered the cause: I had forgotten to remove [encoding: UTF-8] from POTFILES.in. This line is an intltool thing and you have to remove it when porting, same as you need to remove the type hints from the file, or it will break the Makefile that gets generated. This is just a heads-up as it seems like an easy thing to forget, and since the error message provided by make is fairly useless.
A couple unrelated notes:
- If your project uses git.mk, as any Autotools project really should, you’ll have to modify that too.
- Don’t forget to remove any workarounds added to POTFILES.skip to account for intltool’s incompatibility with modern Automake distcheck.
- For some reason, msgfmt merges translations into XML files in reverse alphabetical order, the opposite of intltool, which seems strange and might be a bug, but is harmless.
Say thanks to Daiki Ueno for his work maintaining gettext and enhancing it to make change practical, and to Javier Jardon for pushing this within GNOME and working to remove intltool from important GNOME modules.