Bug#484721: No longer ships (and installs) /usr/share/intltool/*-update.in

[Michael Biebl]

Package: intltool
Version: 0.40.0-1
Severity: serious
Justification: should not enter testing in this state

Hi,

almost any GNOME app out there has the following snippet in it's
Makefile.am:

EXTRA_DIST = \
        intltool-extract.in \
        intltool-merge.in \
        intltool-update.in

The expectation is, that intltoolize copies these files (or symlinks them) and 
they are included in the tarball.

With the latest upgrade, this not only breaks VCS checkouts, which now
have dangling symlinks, it also makes the upgrade path unnecessary
painful, as the Makefile.am can not be changed withouth bumping the
intltool requirement to 0.40.0, which means everyone has to upgrade at
once (a lot of current distributions don't ship intltool 0.40.0).

My recommendation would be, to put the /usr/share/intltool/*-update.in
files back into intltool.
If the requested intltool version (e.g. via IT_PROG_INTLTOOL) is <
0.40, intltool should behave backwards compatible and copy/symlink the
intltool-*.in files as before.

This allows all distros out there to smoothly upgrade to intltool >=
0.40 and then upstream can safely bump the intltool requirement to >=
0.40. In this mode, intltool would not copy the *.in files anymore and
the EXTRA_DIST bits would have to be removed from the Makefile.amS.

Cheers,
Michael

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (300, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25.4
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages intltool depends on:
ii  automake [automaken]      1:1.10.1-3     A tool for generating GNU Standard
ii  automake1.7 [automaken]   1.7.9-9        A tool for generating GNU Standard
ii  automake1.8 [automaken]   1.8.5+nogfdl-2 A tool for generating GNU Standard
ii  automake1.9 [automaken]   1.9.6+nogfdl-3 A tool for generating GNU Standard
ii  file                      4.24-2         Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gettext                   0.17-2         GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  libxml-parser-perl        2.36-1.1+b1    Perl module for parsing XML files
ii  patch                     2.5.9-5        Apply a diff file to an original
ii  perl                      5.10.0-10      Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

intltool recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information