Subject: [bug#45368] [PATCH core-updates 0/3] Help2man updates

From: Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 17:45:06 +0100

Hi,

Sorry for the delay.  I've pushed these changes from 4343ca8ba5 to
cfe606572d, with an additional TODO comment on 378df42fc5 about the
not-so-translated manual pages.

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> If the problem is just the generation of help2man’s own documentation
> when cross-compiling, perhaps we need to add itself as a native input
> when cross-compiling?

Yup, that sounds the cleanest solution.  Nonetheless...

> Anyhow that doesn’t sound like a showstopper to me.

It currently isn't at all, as it says as soon as I tried:

  [...] build system `perl' does not support cross builds

Also, they use a LD_PRELOAD library for the translation, which seems
suspicious too.

>> - The compilation tries to generate translated man pages and sets LC_ALL
>>   to values not available on glibc-utf8-locales, therefore only
>>   languages available there have their manual page properly translated,
>>   such as french.  You can see the following lines (and more) on the
>>   build log, which warn about this issue:
>>   --------------------------------8<-------------------------------- sh:
>>   warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (uk_UA.UTF-8) sh:
>>   warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (vi_VN.UTF-8)
>>   -------------------------------->8--------------------------------
>>
>> IMHO, a change on gnu-build-system to allow the selection of the locales
>> used for the build could be the best way forward, but I haven't
>> implemented it yet.  WDYT?
>
> Yes, that’s a good idea.  There’s already a procedure to generate a
> locale package IIRC.  We just have to make sure its result is properly
> memoized so that performance doesn’t suffer.

I was thinking about the implicit input "locales" and replacing it with
a package generated based on the arguments provided to the build system,
but I guess you're thinking about build-locale from (gnu build locale)
and its usage for the system locales on (gnu system locale).  Should it
be then another derivation at (guix build-system gnu) level?  Any
pointer about this is more than welcome.

> Thanks!

Thank you. :-)

Happy hacking!
Miguel