Re: [Mingw-users] where can I find msgfmt.exe

[Tor L. <tm...@ik...>]

 > Jonathan Wilson wrote:
 > > its asking me for msgfmt.exe.  Where do I find a sutable version
 > > of this program?

Manu writes:
 > I think it is part of gettext:
 > http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435
 > http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/gettext-0.11.5-2003.02.01-1.exe?download

What's wrong with the official GNU binaries for Windows of gettext at
http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gettext/ and its many mirrors?
gettext-tools-0.12.1.bin.woe32.zip is the zipfile containing
msgfmt.exe. I think as gettext and libiconv are one of the few GNU
tools that do have official Win32 binary distributions by their
maintainer, one should encourage this and use that. (If you use those,
you also want to use the official GNU Windows binaries of libiconv, at
http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/)

Actually, that was a rhetorical question. Yes, there is something
wrong with them: The tools (msgfmt.exe etc) in that zipfile use the
statically linked C library, and they won't work with UTF-8 .po
files. I don't remember the exact details, but it was some consequence
of the exes then seeing different C library data than iconv.dll
does. I have otherwise identical versions, but built to use
msvcrt.dll, at
http://www.gimp.org/win32/gettext-tools-0.12.1.bin.woe32.with-msvcrt.zip
. Yes, I did tell the maintainer (Bruno Haible) about this problem,
but he didn't reply to that mail. I probably should bring it up again.

So, if the original poster intends to rebuild the gettext tools, he
should make sure to use the MSVCRT runtime in them.

--tml