Re: Cygwin Package gettext 0.22

[Brian Inglis]

On 2023-06-23 11:00, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > Attached are the latest Cygwin patches applied to the "native" Cygwin build of
> > the latest gettext.
> > It would be nice if you could ever find some time to consider these, and apply
> > or make these (or equivalent changes) part of your sources.
>
> ... and for those that I don't consider, I will tell you why I find that they
> are bad ideas. :)
>
> > Cygwin has dropped some Windows compatibility, unsupported Windows versions, and
> > 32 bit support, while still providing as much Windows interoperability as
> > possible
>
> Understood.

Hi Bruno,

Also below just trying to explain why something may have happened based on the 
log and commitdiffs, as I adopted the package after five years without updates, 
as other packages I maintained needed it updated; for history see:

        https://cygwin.com/git/?p=git/cygwin-packages/gettext.git

> > gettext-0.22-gettext-tools-gnulib-lib-localename-c.patch
> > gettext-0.22-gettext-runtime-intl-gnulib-lib-localename-c.patch
> > gettext-0.22-gettext-runtime-gnulib-lib-localename-c.patch
> The code that you are disabling does the following:
>    * When the user has set their language preferences in the Windows Control
>      Panel,
>      and in Cygwin they do not set any of the environment variables LC_ALL, 
> LC_*,
>      LANG,
>      and the program calls setlocale(LC_ALL,"") — which is what most
>      internationalized programs do —,
>      then localename.c would use the language preferences from the Windows
>      panel.
>      POSIX allows this.
>      Isn't that what the user wants? Why do you disable it? 

Cygwin now translates the Windows locale (and tz) into default POSIX locale (and 
tz) which .profile then exports in the environment for external consumption using:

        export LANG=$(locale -uU)
and
        export TZ=$(/usr/bin/tzset)

e.g. for me:

        $ echo $LANG $TZ
        en_CA.UTF-8 America/Edmonton
        $ locale -uU
        en_GB.UTF-8

but I override giving:

        $ locale
        LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
        LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8"
        LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8"
        LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8"
        LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8"
        LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8"
        LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8"
        LC_ALL=


$ for o in s u i f; do for u in '' '-U' '-n'; do
        oo="-$o $u"; echo -n locale $oo$'\t'; locale $oo;
  done; done # system, user, input, regional format; UTF-8, non-unicode
locale -s       en_US
locale -s -U    en_US.UTF-8
locale -s -n    en_CA
locale -u       en_GB
locale -u -U    en_GB.UTF-8
locale -u -n    en_CA
locale -i       en_CA
locale -i -U    en_CA.UTF-8
locale -i -n    en_CA
locale -f       en_CA
locale -f -U    en_CA.UTF-8
locale -f -n    en_CA

For doc see:

https://cygwin.com/git/?p=newlib-cygwin.git;a=blob;f=winsup/utils/locale.cc

>    * Support for per-thread locales.
>      The unit tests gettext-tools/system-tests/intl-thread-[123] probably fail
>      with your patches. No?

Yes and also plurals-... I will try rebuilding without this patch.
Often these are a result of either what is done in Fedora.spec recipes, used as 
a model for initial Cygwin cygport builds, or pragmatic changes to get things to 
build and/or run in a particular release.
These are often left alone as long as they run as there are few docs.

Any idea what the ll language code represented, can not find it anywhere, and 
why it might be changed to es - glibc variant?

>    * Ignoring a dummy value of LANG, set in ~/.profile.
>      Why should a user explicitly have to *remove* some statements that Cygwin
>      installer has put there, in order to get internationalization working?

See above - it is automatically set and exported.

> > gettext-tests-cygwin.patch
>
> These changes indicate some bugs, introduced in localename.c (above).
>
> > gettext-0.22-no-woe32dll-m4-woe32-dll-m4.patch
> > gettext-0.22-no-woe32dll-gettext-tools-configure-ac.patch
>
> I use the reliable way of building shared libraries on Windows. See my writeup
> at https://haible.de/bruno/woe32dll.html and the file gettext/m4/woe32-dll.m4 .
>
> If you decide to activate another, less reliable, way of building Cygwin
> binaries, that's your responsibility.

It appears that approach was droppind for 18.1 but no notes except comment about 
autoimport - perhaps that was dropped to allow control of visibility of symbols 
within the DLLs?
Cygwin is *NOT* Windows, certainly since amd64/x86_64 arch builds were added, 
and the cygport build system uses autotools with libtool to build libraries 
using gcc --shared, with some naming tweaks e.g. cygintl-8.dll, in a standard 
manner on both arches, and avoids conflicts with native Windows Mingw64 and 
Msys2 builds, which are also supported by and under Cygwin, but both Cygwin and 
Mingw64 cross-builds are also supported under Fedora, which can not use any 
native Win32 approaches.

> > gettext-0.21.1-autopoint-V.patch
>
> I decided to not enable this code, in 2002, because it is dangerous.

There appear to have been some issues with autopoint, gettextise, and libtool 
conflicting behaviour.

> The documentation
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/autopoint-Invocation.html
> explains how the 'autopoint' program is meant to be used. I don't see the
> point of adding an option to make it work differently.

I think there may be issues with other non-GNU upstreams (invisible-island.net) 
where their packages depend on custom frozen earlier versions of autotools 
components, and the cygport build maintainers wanted to avoid custom patches, as 
at one point they supported about 3k packages!
Also remember NTP required specific frozen earlier autotools versions.

> > gettext-0.21.1-cygwin-ftm.patch
>
> It could be that this one is useful. Can you point me to the original report,
> please?

https://cygwin.com/git/?p=git/cygwin-packages/gettext.git;a=commitdiff;h=51f84616d86fe906f1eeae7f298eb11a7fba633d

Some maintainers were and are RedHat volunteers who used Fedora (perhaps only at 
home), also as a reference, and seemed to be professionally involved with POSIX 
and feature test macros.

> > gettext-0.22-disable-libtextstyle.patch
>
> No comment.
Adopted from Fedora:

        https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/gettext/tree/main

which now has the same patch updated, and from which also the Cygwin 
gettext-devel package includes msghack.{py,1}.

We also keep an eye on Debian and OpenSuSE for useful patches to apply.

--
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis              Calgary, Alberta, Canada

La perfection est atteinte                   Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter  not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer     but when there is no more to cut
                                -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry