Question

In the Emperor project, I’m having some issues getting intltool to work when doing an out-of-tree build. When running make check out-of-tree, which is one of the things make distcheck does, intltool fails thus:

INTLTOOL_EXTRACT="/usr/bin/intltool-extract" XGETTEXT="/usr/bin/xgettext" srcdir=../../po /usr/bin/intltool-update --gettext-package emperor --pot
can't open ../../po/../data/emperor.desktop.in: No such file or directory at /usr/bin/intltool-extract line 212.

intltool is looking for emperor.desktop.in, which is listed in po/POTFILES.in, in the source tree. However, emperor.desktop.in is generated by the configure script from a file called emperor.desktop.in.in, in order to insert the installed executable path as configured by the user, and lands in the build tree.

These are the relevant bootstrap.sh lines:

echo +++ Running intltoolize ... &&
intltoolize --force --copy &&
cat >>po/Makefile.in.in <<EOF

../data/_column_names.h:
    cd ../data && \$(MAKE) _column_names.h

EOF

The setup code in configure.ac:

IT_PROG_INTLTOOL([0.35.0])

GETTEXT_PACKAGE=emperor
AC_SUBST(GETTEXT_PACKAGE)
AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED([GETTEXT_PACKAGE], ["$GETTEXT_PACKAGE"],
                                      [The domain to use with gettext])
AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT

data/emperor.desktop.in is listed in AC_CONFIG_FILES.

data/Makefile.am contains these lines:

desktopdir = $(datadir)/applications
desktop_in_files = emperor.desktop.in
desktop_DATA = $(desktop_in_files:.desktop.in=.desktop)
@INTLTOOL_DESKTOP_RULE@

and po/POTFILES.in contains the line

data/emperor.desktop.in

You can review all the details in the public git repository if you wish.

Can I somehow tell intltool that this file will be located in the build tree, not in the source tree? Otherwise, my options appear to be to break make distcheck (not a great option), or to ship a desktop file that doesn’t include the full path and assumes that the executable is installed in the PATH. (just as messy, IMHO) – Any other options?

Answer 1

Some further digging has brought me believe that the answer is: intltool does not support source files that aren’t source files in the project. Ergo, any additional processing must be done after intltool is through

Intltool requires the lines in POTFILES to be relative to the (build-time) working directory. The file POTFILES is generated by the configure script from POTFILES.in with a simple sed script defined in the IT_PO_SUBDIR autoconf macro (called by IT_PROG_INTLTOOL) that simply prepends the relative location of the top-level source directory to the paths. Alas, modifying POTFILES does not help: the intltool-extract script does everything it can to get the source directory right. I don’t believe files that are sometimes inside and sometimes outside the source tree can be supported without modifying intltool itself.