Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh(_at_)debian(_dot_)org>:
On Wed, 03 Oct 2001, ESR wrote:
Just I as expected, the attempt to build fetchmail.pot at distribution
time triggered yet another obscure and fatal bug in the festering pile
of rancid dog vomit that is GNU gettext (that's with the latest
version installed, too).
Or in the absurd mess that the fetchmail makefiles are (INCLUDING the
gettext stuff in them)... I am more afraid of touching the makefiles
than trying to get the stuff under intl/ and po/ to work :(
The fetchmail makefiles are *not* a mess; I understand them and can
maintain them. I don't understand gettext's broken, random behavior.
I'm not interested in understanding gettext's broken, random behavior.
That ends *that* discussion.
Not again :( ARGH. Eric, I can maintain the gettext stuff for you. As long
as you do not mind using --with-included-gettext yourself when building
fetchmail, that should reduce your gettext problems to nearly nothing.
I don't think having you maintain a critical piece of the build machinery
is really practical. If my build machinery doesn't work because gettext
is broken, the fact that your machinery might work under a different
distribution doesn't help me.
The only problem is that to fully take over gettext-in-fetchmail
maintenance, I'd also need to somehow override the m4 macros your system
uses when you run aclocal, but that should not be too dificult.
And that's why. I don't know how to do this, and at this point I am
so convinced that gettext is an irredeemably fucked-up mass of manure
that I will not expend further effort to learn how, because I believe
it will only drag me deeper into a toxic swamp. I am fed up with
beating my head bloody against that particular wall. I have better
things to do with my time.
Please do not remove the i18n support. People whose native language is
English almost always understimate the need, and value of i18n... How would
you deal with software in Finish, Portuguese or, say, Turkish?
I understand the value of internationalization. It is just that I am
so fed up with this garbage that the pain does not seem worth the
value. And don't bother trying to raise my perceived value of i18n
because my disgust with gettext is effectively infinite :-(.
I will unbend this much. I expect to install RH 7.2 shortly. If the 7.2
autoconfig/gettext tools eliminate the problems I've had in the past, I
will not drop gettext support.
--
<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be
properly armed."
-- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188