gettext 0.11.3b2: autopoint problems

[psmith]

Hi all;

I'm having problems using autopoint.

I'm a big confused as to why it's trying to do CVS lookups, but
regardless that part of the code is definitely not working.

It's trying to grab the code associated with a label it constructs from
the version number.  There are two problems:

 1) The construct does not properly modify - to _; instead of
    "gettext_0_11_3_pre2" (which is what I think I need based on the
    current labels) I get "gettext-0_11_3-pre2".  This is easily fixed
    in the code.

 2) There is no label applied to the CVS tree for this pretest release.
    In fact I don't think there's a label applied for the gettext-0.11.2
    release either.

The upshot is that autopoint simply fails to work, and I can't fix it
due to #2.

I would prefer there be a way to avoid the CVS checkout, by an override
switch or something.  Maybe autopoint could look on the local disk to see
if the current installation of gettext is the same as the version, and
use the installed files rather then checking them out of CVS.

I agree (as per the comments in autopoint) that requiring a CVS
executable is not a big hardship, but requiring that you _must_ have
successful net access to the CVS repository before you can build _IS_ a
big problem: I often want to work on things on my laptop on planes or
whatever while I'm totally offline.  Not being able to run autopoint
during those times will be a problem!

Not only that, but this means you'll have to either not support
autopoint invocation from CVS checkouts or you'll have to be _very_
careful about when you update your version number in configure.in in
CVS.  I think you will discover that tying the tool to the CVS archive
like this will lead to headaches for you.


Again, as with gettextize, I wonder if this isn't a case of the tool
trying to be too smart.  As a maintainer's utility gettext really must
trust the user.  This is not an end-user, newbie-type tool.  People
using this tool are clueful, or should at least be assumed so.

Can we consider whether there isn't some other way to accomplish the
same results?  I would be quite happy if autopoint's default behavior
simply compared the installed version with the one specified in
configure.in, and either printed a warning if they were different, or
just failed: but please provide a --force switch to override the
failure.  Then another switch, like --checkout or something, could be
provided to ask autopoint to check out the right version from CVS of the
user wanted.

-- 
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