...and fix CI? Re: [PATCH] Install new autoreconf files.

Updates:

I have added an Issue ("Work item") #520 and Merge Request !192 to the 
muttmua project to fix the gettext issue below and one more to fix 
out-of-path "make check" for shellcheck and tabcheck.

The Gitlab pipeline fails because the local debian/trixie image seems to 
be missing the "autopoint" package, which on Debian Trixie is split out 
from the gettext* packages. I don't see how the image 
registry.gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/debian:trixie gets built or pushed and 
haven't pulled it to see what's in it.

On Debian trixie, autopoint is a separate package from gettext and needs 
to be installed separately, but you may NOT want to take my 
.gitlab-ci.yml patch here 
https://gitlab.com/mandree/mutt/-/commit/51c6549b875813e2a81673c1a1005ae741cfca37

Am 13.04.26 um 18:59 schrieb Matthias Andree via Mutt-dev:
>
> Am 13.04.26 um 12:21 schrieb Kevin J. McCarthy:
>> On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 10:33:31AM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen via 
>> Mutt-dev wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 12:44:21PM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
>>>> The only workaround I could
>>>> find was running autoreconf with '-if' to force install.
>>>>
>>> this is a completely normal thing to require for a build from a git. 
>>> why are these .m4 files even in the repository?
>>
>> Hi Oswald,
>>
>> Historically they have been, for far longer than when I came on the 
>> project.  The prepare script seems not to have been changed for 19 
>> years.  I haven't seen this problem since I've been maintaining mutt, 
>> so I'm a bit confused. 
>
> Hi everyone, long time no mail to the lists from my part...
>
>
> It helps to put a line "AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.21)" into 
> configure.ac.  Reason is this is the only way to tell autopoint (which 
> runs underneath autoreconf) to know what version the m4/ and po/ files 
> it copies are from. It doesn't know, so it can break on any system 
> that's sufficiently far away from the 0.21 files that Kevin checked 
> into these folders 2021, with 
> https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/-/commit/ccc18061461c025ee05754d4b9e8f94db2fdb233
>
> My routine for git checkouts is "autoreconf -isvf", or, spelled out, 
> "autoreconf -install --symlink --verbose --force"; gettext on the 
> maintainer's (Kevin's) system changes, autopoint needs the --force 
> option to get the matching files there in case it's unspecified or 
> somehow doesn't work because then autopoint has the liberty of making 
> everything consistent (autoreconf passes the --force option through).
>
> Now, the CI builder or another developer's computer may have a 
> different gettext version then Kevin, and then that developer or CI 
> job's notion of what gettext should be ("whatever I have locally") and 
> what's in m4/ are inconsistence, and that wreaks havoc. I have seen 
> over the years that some files get added to m4/, others are removed.
>
> In fetchmail, the only package I maintain (upstream) that uses GNU 
> gettext, I do not check in m4/ files, but my CI setup is also 
> considerably narrower than mutt's apparently, and I test on a few 
> Linux distros, FreeBSD, and occasionally OpenBSD
>
>
>> When I updated to a vanilla gettext configuration with gettextize 
>> five years ago, I committed the changes, as I thought the manual 
>> suggested:
>>
>> https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Distributed-Development.html 
>>
>>
>> However, if it I did something wrong, then let's talk about what 
>> needs to be changed. 
>
>
> The "something wrong" part can be fixed by adding one line 
> AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.21) to configure.ac
>
> Thas two impacts:
>
> 1. it specifies the oldest that can be on a user's computer when 
> building mutt (because we set AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external]) as is 
> advised), to avoid arcane errors but make the minimum version 
> explicit, and if autopoint is older than 0.21, it will reject and 
> suggest updating. Since autopoint runs before ./configure, 
> --disable-nls does not help.
>
> 2. it tells developers' autopoint that the m4/ files are good, and on 
> my Fedora 43 (which has gettext 0.25.1), it only wants to add 
> po/Makevars.template (which is for bootstrapping things, but mutt 
> already has po/Makevars, so it's of limited use -- for maintainers 
> still helpful only during gettextize-based updates to see if new 
> configuration items appear by diffing Makevars and the .template and 
> look what's local customization and what's upstream addition).
>
>
> HTH
>
> Cheers,
> Matthias
>