gettext-1.0 is missing a lot of aclocal m4 files (breaks libiconv detection in X11 projects due to missing )

[jeremyhu (Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia)]

Older gettext installed:

${prefix}/share/aclocal/po.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/lib-link.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/gettext.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/progtest.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/iconv.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/nls.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/lib-prefix.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/lib-ld.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/host-cpu-c-abi.m4
${prefix}/share/aclocal/intlmacosx.m4

gettext-1.0 only installs:

${prefix}/share/aclocal/nls.m4

The missing iconv.m4 in particular means that X11 projects like xwininfo cannot autoreconf any more, eg:

+ autoreconf -fvi
autoreconf: export WARNINGS=
autoreconf: Entering directory '.'
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Gettext
autoreconf: running: aclocal -I /opt/X11/share/aclocal -I /opt/buildX11/share/aclocal --force
configure.ac:34: warning: macro 'AM_ICONV' not found in library
autoreconf: configure.ac: tracing
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Libtool
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Intltool
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Gtkdoc
autoreconf: running: /opt/buildX11/bin/autoconf --force
configure.ac:34: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_ICONV
      If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
      See the Autoconf documentation.
autoreconf: error: /opt/buildX11/bin/autoconf failed with exit status: 1

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

These are now installed in ${prefix}/share/gettext/m4/.

[jeremyhu (Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia)]

Yep... just noticed that. I'll workaround that on my side for now...

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

This caused issues for other distros too, but it's a deliberate change upstream since the old location was causing other issues sometimes.

• ​https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2366708
• ​https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67090

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

The tl;dr seems to be that the issue a lot of the time is configure.ac not calling AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION, which would make autopoint find the macros automatically.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Jeremy! It's so nice to hear from you again.

Replying to jmroot:

The tl;dr seems to be that the issue a lot of the time is configure.ac not calling AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION, which would make autopoint find the macros automatically.

Oh, that's interesting, I hadn't found that yet. I'll check out those links. I've just been adding the -I flag when calling aclocal or autoreconf.

But I have already been fixing ports for this problem, and I made a list of all ports using gettext and autoconf that I was working my way through, but I haven't made it very far yet because there's also libxml2-update-related problems to fix and the build server was being knocked offline several times a day due to AI crawlers, plus other bugs people submit.