Re: Bug#400453: Makefile misses to clean .gmo-files in the clean target, so they get never be updated after updating an .po file (fwd)

[Bruno Haible]

Daniel Leidert wrote:
> I hope you don't interpret "special tools" as "all tools except make and
> configure".

That's the critical point: "special tools", by consensus of the community,
means "all tools except sh, make, assembler, compiler, and a few POSIX
standardized shell utilities like sed, tr, grep etc."

msgfmt is a special tool. m4 is a special tool. makeinfo is a special tool.
perl is a special tool. Etc.

Hence a user of a package that uses gettext but who does not have msgfmt
installed should be able to do
  "./configure; make; make clean; make; make install".

> But when I update a .po-file, I expect, that the
> resulting .gmo file is updated too. I do not expect, that I have to
> manually walk through the tree and call make targets.

Can you explain a bit more about your situation and motivation? What are you
actually trying to do? Are you a package maintainer or a translator? Why is
it important to you to change a PO file in the build tree of a package,
whereas most translators are happy with the "msgfmt then cp" method explained
in the gettext tutorial ($prefix/share/doc/gettext/tutorial.html)?

Bruno