On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 12:57 PM, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. I wonder if something like following patch could help, as anyway the build will fail if Tcl/Tk is not installed and people often prefer builds failing at the beginning rather than towards the end. diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile index ee9d5eb11e..9789027739 100644 --- a/Makefile +++ b/Makefile @@ -1636,6 +1636,13 @@ ifeq ($(TCLTK_PATH),) NO_TCLTK = NoThanks endif +ifndef NO_TCLTK + has_tcltk := $(shell type $(TCLTK_PATH) 2>/dev/null) + ifndef has_tcltk +$(error "Tcl/Tk is not installed ('$(TCLTK_PATH)' not found). Consider setting NO_TCLTK or installing it") + endif +endif + ifeq ($(PERL_PATH),) NO_PERL = NoThanks endif