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I *really* hate gettext

OK, so I know that some of this is certainly self-inflicted, but I seem to regularly run into trouble where I try to upgrade a bunch of ports on a FreeBSD installation somewhere, and bam suddenly I get build errors around locales or gettext shared libraries.

Sigh.

Now, I do like my applications to be able to speak French just as much as the next guy, but somehow the amount of grief that this has been causing me over the years is getting to be significant.

Latest issue is trying to rebuild ports on 3 different machines following an upgrade to FreeBSD 9.1. All went smoothly with the O/S upgrade using freebsd-update, but trying to rebuild the ports after fetching the latest versions using portsnap is proving harder than expected (or warranted).

I have downloaded the latest ports, and am trying to do the equivalent of "portmaster -a", and then I get:

./localename.c: In function '_nl_locale_name_thread_unsafe':
./localename.c:2607: error: 'locale_t' undeclared (first use in this function)
./localename.c:2607: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
./localename.c:2607: error: for each function it appears in.)
./localename.c:2607: error: expected ';' before 'thread_locale'
./localename.c:2608: error: 'thread_locale' undeclared (first use in this function)
./localename.c:2608: error: 'LC_GLOBAL_LOCALE' undeclared (first use in this function)
*** Error code 1

when compiling /usr/ports/devel/gettext/work/gettext-0.18.1.1/gettext-runtime/intl/localename.c, which seems to indicate that "locale_t" is undefined and therefore that configure is probably not picking the requirements for locale on my system correctly, or that I have some old dependencies lying around.

So, hunting around in "/usr/ports/UPDATING" seems to indicate that I should rebuild converters/libiconv first, and then rebuild devel/gettext. So, I did that. But still not success. So it seems I would need to rebuild devel/libtool first, so I did that too. But still gettext won't compile.

Sigh.

This whole i18n thing seems to violate the principle of least astonishment.

Anyway, just a rant because I am frustrated. I'll go back to it and attempt to do things right this time... but I really do hate gettext.

P.S. Sigh... even sudo fails with "sudo: unable to dlopen /usr/local/libexec/sudoers.so: Shared object "libintl.so.9" not found, required by "sudoers.so""... will rebuild it without the NLS option!

P.P.S. Finally solved it by recompiling the world and kernel from source... and then "gettext" compiled correctly. Not sure what changed... this is unpleasant.

/FreeBSD | Posted at 02:08 | permanent link