Dermot McCluskey <Dermot.McCluskey <at> Sun.COM> writes: > Apologies if this is not the correct alias for this question.
This list is reasonable for the question, since you encountered the file when installing m4; but I'm not the most knowledgeable on the issue. You might have better luck by asking on bug-gnu-libiconv, where the upstream source for charset.alias generation is maintained, or on bug-gnu-gettext, which makes the most use of the file. > > Where can I find out more about the /usr/lib/charset.alias > file installed by m4 (1.4.9)? m4 1.4.11 is the latest stable release, and fixes several bugs present in 1.4.9. charset.alias is generated by any GNU project that uses libiconv/gettext for character encoding translation; see the file lib/config.charset. m4 does not yet support message translation, but picked up charset.alias generation by virtue of using gnulib modules related to gettext. The file is meant to grow in scope; as additional GNU packages are installed, the file is edited to show the increased list of client programs, as well as updating the list of known aliases if generated from a newer version of config.charset. > > On my system (Solaris) this file is already installed by > glib and there is a similar table in /usr/lib/iconv/alias. > > Is /usr/lib/charset.alias a recognized, stable interface? That is something better asked of the libiconv/gettext maintainer. It is intended to reflect what the GNU tools can expect from your platform's native capabilities in the iconv arena. > > Would it be a big job for me to patch m4 to use the > existing iconv and gettext on my system rather than > /usr/lib/charset.alias? Don't bother patching just the m4 tarball, since m4 does not maintain any of the sources of the file. Rather, patch lib/config.charset, and send that patch to bug-gnu-libiconv. Then _all_ GNU programs that share the generated charset.alias will benefit. -- Eric Blake _______________________________________________ m4-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/m4-discuss
