Re: Possible po.m4 bug in gettext-0.16.1.tar.gz po.m4 -- using "--statistics" to check for msgfmt

[Bruno Haible]

Mark Moriarty wrote:
> I'm building VLC (VideoLAN Client).

OK. I see vlc-0.8.6c uses the gettext infrastructure from version 0.11.5;
but maybe you have rebuilt that configure files?

> The problem I'm observing is that when configure is run on VLC it knows that
> it needs to use libintl, but the po.m4 file that's in the gettext v16.1
> runtime is old, has a bad switch.

I'm asking for the problem as a factual statement, not for your conclusion
of the cause of the problem.

> Config.log shows:
> configure:22986: checking whether NLS is requested
> configure:22995: result: yes
> configure:23033: checking for msgfmt
> configure: trying /usr/local/bin/msgfmt...
> C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin\msgfmt.exe: error while opening "/dev/null" for
> reading: No such file or directory

OK, from this we see:

  - The gettext macros in use are from version 0.14.2 or newer.
    (Earlier versions did not show the "trying ..." line.)

  - msgfmt was called with argument "/dev/null", tried to fopen("/dev/null","r")
    and failed.

  - The pathname of itself that msgfmt shows has backslashes, not slashes
    as usual on Cygwin.

Since /dev/null is built-in into the Cygwin libraries, I think the binaries
you are using are mingw binaries, not Cygwin binaries. Are you sure you
did not specify "-mno-cygwin" when you built your gettext binaries?

> If I physically type msgfmt --version in a bash shell, it reports:
> msgfmt.exe (GNU gettext-tools) 0.16.1

Good. As expected.

> Exactly what it should, what is expected.  If I type the command that's
> contained in gettext-runtime/m4/po.m4:
> Msgfmt --statistics /dev/null
> 
> $ msgfmt --statistics /dev/null
> C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin\msgfmt.exe: error while opening "/dev/null" for
> reading: No such file o
> r directory

Yup. Same as above.

> It generates exactly the error that's being captured in my config.log -- the
> "grep usage" part of the test doesn't find "usage".

It didn't even get to the "grep usage" part. The line with "grep usage" is
only invoked if the first invocation of "msgfmt --statistics /dev/null"
succeeded. Which it did not.

> Instead, it should be:
> Msgfmt --help /dev/null

Nope. The comments say that the purpose of this test is to exclude
early GNU msgfmt versions. But all GNU msgfmt support the --help option.

So, my guess is that either your binaries are not Cygwin binaries, or that
some installation problem of Cygwin causes the access to /dev/null to fail.

Bruno