Re: Adding init-po and update-po targets to the meson build system

Hi,

On Thu, 8 Oct 2026 at 12:54, Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 7 Oct 2026 at 19:58, Jacob Champion
> <jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 7, 2026 at 9:40 AM Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > > Yes, I agree that it is kind of nightmarish. I considered both options
> > > and chose to use JSON files because, AFAIK, we want to remove the
> > > autoconf system and use meson in the future. So, using JSON files
> > > makes more sense to me from a maintainability perspective for this
> > > reason.
> >
> > A third path might be to disentangle the NLS makefiles from
> > Makefile.global, so that you don't need Autoconf in order to make use
> > of their targets. Then the Meson targets could just defer to that
> > implementation.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion! I think this is worth trying because using
> existing nls.mk files tremendously reduces the #lines_changed and also
> removes the need of helper scripts.

After thinking more about that, I am not sure if that is an acceptable
solution. In the Postgres docs [1] we mention that 'GNU make' is not
needed when Postgres is built with meson and I think we don't want to
break this promise. Perhaps this is acceptable because the current
case is specific and not widely used.

> > (sslfiles.mk took a similar approach, and I've been happy with it so
> > far.

Also, I realized that there is no way to regenerate SSL files like
sslfiles.mk does :(.

--
Regards,
Nazir Bilal Yavuz
Microsoft