debian gettext and java

[Santiago Vila]

Hello.

Some time ago somebody submitted a bug about strange java messages
being shown when using msginit, see http://bugs.debian.org/244215.

A little bit naively (I admit), I decided to fix this by building
gettext using gcj, but as a side effect, the gettext package ended up
depending on libgcj4, which is a very big package, and nobody was
happy with this.

A closer look at the problem in #244215 (thanks go to Denis Barbier)
showed that the ugly warning message could be avoided with little effort.
Quoting Denis:

> I did not have a close look at gnu.gettext.DumpResource, but
> gnu.gettext.GetURL (which triggered #244215) is only used by
> /usr/lib/gettext/urlget.  Now have a look at
> gettext-tools/src/urlget.c and you will see that the fetch() command
> tries several scenarios to download a file from an URL.  For all
> except gnu.gettext.GetURL, it first checks whether the tool seems to
> work (here nothing is sent do stdout or stderr), and then perform the
> download with normal stdout and stderr so that problems can be
> reported.  So #244215 is due to the fact that gnu.gettext.GetURL is
> run without first checking whether it can run.  A fix is to let
> gnu.gettext.GetURL.main handle a --version option, and treat
> gnu.gettext.GetURL like other alternatives in the fetch() function.

So what I did as a simple and effective fix to remove the ugly warning
was to apply the following patch to the Debian gettext package:

diff -ru gettext-0.14.5.orig/gettext-tools/src/urlget.c 
gettext-0.14.5/gettext-tools/src/urlget.c
--- gettext-0.14.5.orig/gettext-tools/src/urlget.c      2005-05-20 
22:44:41.000000000 +0200
+++ gettext-0.14.5/gettext-tools/src/urlget.c   2005-05-25 19:37:23.657696728 
+0200
@@ -239,7 +239,7 @@
 fetch (const char *url, const char *file)
 {
   /* First try: using Java.  */
-  {
+  if (0) {
     const char *class_name = "gnu.gettext.GetURL";
     const char *gettextjexedir;
     const char *gettextjar;

and then added a fields "Recommends: curl | wget | lynx" to the package
to ensure that people honoring the recommends have at least one of the
other alternatives.

However, it would be nice if gnu.gettext.GetURL.main could handle
a --version option, as suggested by Denis, so that I do not need to
disable the java part in urlget.c. This is currently the only
modification (other than the debian/* files) which the Debian gettext
package makes to the original source.

Thanks.