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

On 2026-Oct-09, Nazir Bilal Yavuz wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Oct 2026 at 19:10, Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de> wrote:
> > On 2026-Oct-08, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> > > There is also a the problem that whenever a source file is added, it needs
> > > to be added to nls.mk manually. It would be nice to get rid of that
> > > requirement, if we're going to make significant changes to this.
> >
> > I think the problem is that we have generated files whose strings we
> > want (say, generated by Perl code), and other generated files whose
> > strings we do not want (e.g., those generated from .l and .y files.)
>
> I couldn't think of any solution that avoids manual maintenance. I
> found a thread [1] that uses wildcard to include each source file but
> since there could be files that we explicitly don't want, there should
> be still manual maintenance; right? Perhaps including all of the
> source files and excluding some is easier than the reverse?

I think a list of the files to ignore might work well, especially if
there's a base rule like ignoring .c files generated from .y/.l, so we
only need to list files to ignore in addition to those. (I suspect such
a list would be empty in most cases.)

By the way, here's a thread where we tried to do something related
previously:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20220713.160853.453362706160476128.horikyota.ntt%40gmail.com

I think a takeaway from that thread is that searching for files in the
filesystem (or git ls-files) is not good enough. But maybe if you get
Meson to give you a list of all the source files which are compiled to
produce each program, that might work.

--
Álvaro Herrera Breisgau, Deutschland — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"La conclusión que podemos sacar de esos estudios es que
no podemos sacar ninguna conclusión de ellos" (Tanenbaum)