Comment 3 for bug 1299862

Hi Rodney,

thanks for your comment. I understand that GNU make is a requirement to *run* intltool, but should it also be a requirement for building any intltoolized packages?

The point is that intltool is run by package maintainers when preparing packages for internationalization, making source distributions, and all that. These are maintainer tasks, so it is okay to require all kinds of non-portable tools for that.

But on the other hand, shouldn't the resulting packages then be able to be compiled and installed anywhere? It has always been my assumption that that was one of the central goals of the autoconf/automake/intltool suite of tools. I am talking about the ./configure; make; make install part of the build process of some package that uses internationalization. These are tasks for the package installer (typically end user).

The problem with this bug is that it does not just affect the person running intltoolize or similar. It affects the actual person installing the resulting package. I still think that this is a bug, because the task that breaks the Makefile has something to do with detecting which translations are available. That is a maintainer issue that should be resolved at distribution time, not at build time.

If the packages prepared with intltool are no longer portable, that would be a shame. Please consider fixing this!

Thanks, -- Peter