Re: Big picture of building & packaging

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

> Brief background: I'm debugging a difference in behavior between v0.21 and 
> v0.21.1 on OSX as part of building something in the nixpkgs project.

Maybe, if you state the actual problem, I can make some guess as to the cause?
The NEWS file doesn't mention a modified behaviour on macOS 10.*, only that
"Building on macOS 11/arm64 is now supported."

> I have exhausted some easy / low-tech ways to find out the root cause and 
> would like to bisect gettext.
> 
> The problem is that nixpkgs builds gettext from source in the released tar 
> files and not from the Git repository, so I need to translate from one to the 
> other. For instance, as you know, the tar files have gnulib vendored under 
> gettext-tools while the repository does not. I poked around a little and 
> tried "./gitsub.sh pull" followed by "./autogen.sh" and ran into some error 
> related to patching files (on an M1 Mac).

Bisecting gettext is possible, but
  - be sure to use the '0.21.x' branch of
    https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=summary
  - on this branch, the 'gnulib' submodule switched to a branch as well,
    namely gnulib's stable-202201 branch.

> I can debug that and push this to the end, but I'm worried about sinking a 
> lot of time unproductively if the actual packaging process is completely 
> different.

Not only that. Also, bisecting usually assumes that all commits in the history
were "good" in the sense that they produced a working build. But especially as
  - sometimes a commit (or a few commits) are not working, and this gets only
    corrected a week later or so,
  - macOS 11 is not a frequently tested platform,
you can get into all sorts of trouble while bisecting.

> Would you be able to advise me on whether I am on the right track here?

I would say that it's going to be a big time sink. It's most likely more
productive if you just state the problem.

Bruno