[PATCH] Remove dependency from libintl in Samba4.

[Jelmer Vernooij]

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Timur I. Bakeyev wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 09:27:30AM +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
>> On Sun, 2009-06-07 at 22:52 +0000, Timur I. Bakeyev wrote:
>>> After some digging I figured out that this dependency comes
>>> from the domestic version of Heimdal, that comes with Samba4.
>>> Honestly, I don't believe that there is any real need for the
>>> l10n of the library, that used only deeply internally.
>> Why?
>
> Well, _I_ have multiple reasons for this, but not all of them would
> be valid for the rest of the audience. So, just a few of a generic
> nature:
>
> 2. Another problem with linking is created by the way, how Samba4
> includes the found libraries. Basically, it tries hard to
> incorporate EVERYTHING it was able to find cross the system.
> Contrary to the long standing GNU software practice, when each
> --with|--enable flag has a corresponding --without|--disable flag,
> in the current Samba4 configure there is no way to disable unwanted
> features. If you happen to have libintl in your system, it will be
> included, no matter what(yes, there is a form of
> SMB_ENABLE(INTL,NO)) that should make the trick, but there is no
> way to trigg it, AFAIK).
We don't have a particular objection to having such flags, it's mainly
just that nobody has added them yet. If there is a use case for
disabling libintl, we should have a --enable-intl/--disable-intl flag.
> 3. Having localized libraries is the worse idea ever, IMHO. I can
> imagine, that UI could be quite useful when presented in the native
>  language for those who cant grasp English. But when it comes down
> to the API - the only time the messages from it are exposed to the
> end user - are the cases of some serious internal problems. And at
> that point it should be meaningful to the developer, not end user.
> I guess, you don't want to receive error report like:

If libraries aren't translated then each and every application that
provides a translated UI should worry about translating the messages
that the library can return and that it might have to display.

There is no point in translation developer error messages indeed, but
a lot of messages from Heimdal don't fall into that category. Other
things that would be good candidates for translation in Heimdal are
strings like "Your ticket has expired.", "Unable to find keytab", etc.
I don't see what's so bad about translating that.
>
> msgid "" "Heimdal requires the name of your local realm. This is
> typically your domain " "name in uppercase. eg if your hostname is
> host.org.com, then your realm will " "become ORG.COM. The default
> for your host is ${default_realm}." msgstr "" "Heimdal требует имя
> вашей местной области. Это обычно ваше доменное имя, " "написанное
> прописными буквами. Напр., если имя вашего хоста host.org.com, "
> "тогда вашей областью будет ORG.COM. Областью по умолчанию для
> вашего хоста " "является ${default_realm}."
>
> This is taken from Debian kdc.po, not exactly API message and it
> belongs to deb-conf, not Heimdal itself. But related. I should also
> mention, that the translation is very obscure, doesn't operate with
> the common practice terms and in general more misleading, than
> helpful.
I don't think a single bad translation is a good reason to disable
translations altogether. Rather, the translation should just be fixed.

>> It would also create another difference between Heimdal as used
>> internally, and our hope to have a system Heimdal used in future.
>>
>
> And here we are comming to the most interesting part.
>
> # find source4 -name \*.po
>
> Gives NO results. There are just simply no PO files. Moreover,
> distribution of the Heimdal 1.2.1 doesn't have them either! Neither
> does it have --with-nls flag to the configure. Nor it has any
> references to the libintl anywhere, besides few files which were
> generated by bison and have HAVE_LIBINTL conditional include.
>
> So, to me it seems that the whole addition of the libintl was a
> mistake in a first place, caused by quick look through the code and
> noticeing HAVE_LIBINTL condition. But it has no use and is
> automatically added by bison to all generated files.
We should talk to upstream Heimdal about this and either including po
files there or removing libintl support. It's indeed pointless to link
against libintl without any actual translations :-)

Cheers,

Jelmer
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