On Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 12:58:13AM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 03:44:17PM +0200, Dominik Mahrer (Teddy) wrote: > > > Hi all > > > > I'm compiling git from source code on a mashine without msgfmt. This leads > > to compile errors. To be able to compile git I created a patch that at least > > works for me: > > Try: > > make NO_MSGFMT=Nope NO_GETTEXT=Nope > > This also works: > > make NO_GETTEXT=Nope NO_TCLTK=Nope > > The flags to avoid gettext/msgfmt are sadly different between git itself > and git-gui/gitk, which we include as a subproject. It would be a useful > patch to harmonize though (probably by accepting both in all places for > compatibility). I saw somebody else today run into problems about gettext, so I thought I'd revisit this and write that patch. It turns out the situation is slightly different than I thought. So no patch, but I wanted to report here what I found. It's true that the option is called NO_GETTEXT in git.git, but NO_MSGFMT in the tcl programs we pull in. So I figured to start with a patch that turns on NO_MSGFMT automatically when NO_GETTEXT is set. But it's not necessary. The gitk and git-gui tests actually check that msgfmt is available. If it isn't, they automatically fall back to using a pure-tcl implementation. So there's generally no need to set NO_MSGFMT at all. But that fallback is implemented using tcl. So if you _also_ don't have tcl installed (and I don't), you get quite a confusing output from make: $ make -j1 SUBDIR git-gui MSGFMT po/pt_pt.msg Makefile:252: recipe for target 'po/pt_pt.msg' failed make[1]: *** [po/pt_pt.msg] Error 127 If you run with V=1, you can see that it's not running msgfmt at all, but: tclsh po/po2msg.sh --statistics --tcl -l pt_pt -d po/ po/pt_pt.po So my takeaways are: 1. You should never need to set NO_MSGFMT; it falls back automatically. 2. If you don't have gettext, you should set NO_GETTEXT to tell the rest of git not to use it. 3. If you see msgfmt errors even after NO_GETTEXT, try NO_TCLTK. -Peff