Re: [PATCH] git-sh-i18n: detect and avoid broken gettext(1) implementation

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 13:49, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] wrote:

Even though we can load gettext.sh the gettext(1) and eval_gettext
functions it provides might be completely broken. This reportedly
happens on some Cygwin installations where we can load gettext.sh, but
gettext and eval_gettext both return exit code 127 and no output.

The reason we're trying to load gettext.sh (or the equivalent Solaris
implementation) at all is so we don't have to provide our own fallback
implementation if the OS already has one installed, but because we
didn't test whether it actually worked under GNU gettext we might end
up with broken functions.

Change the detection in git-sh-i18n so that it tests that the output
of "gettext test" produces "test", on Solaris we already test that
"gettext -h" produces "-h", so we were already guarded against the
same sort of failure there.

Reported-by: Alex Riesen <redacted>
---
Here's a minimal patch to git-sh-i18n that should make things work on
Cygwin and any other platforms with broken gettext functions while
also using the OS-provided functions if they work.

FWIW, I confirm it works (which is quite obvious).

Just for giggles, I even risked running the tests and, of course, crashed
that piece of junk with broken Cygwin installation.
Please don't ask me to do that again :) restarting it is PITA as well.

Just for future reference to all poor Cygwin users:

I also left NO_GETTEXT in the config.mak. This, BTW, explains why git
works, while gettext binary does not: one .dll dependency less.