GNU gettext utilities: autopoint Invocation

13.6.4 Invoking the autopoint Program

autopoint [option]...

The autopoint program copies standard gettext infrastructure files into a source package. It extracts from a macro call of the form AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(version), found in the package’s configure.in or configure.ac file, the gettext version used by the package, and copies the infrastructure files belonging to this version into the package.

To extract the latest available infrastructure which satisfies a version requirement, then you can use the form AM_GNU_GETTEXT_REQUIRE_VERSION(version) instead. For example, if gettext 0.21 is installed on your system and 0.19.1 is requested, then the infrastructure files of version 0.21 will be copied into a source package.

13.6.4.1 Options

‘-f’ ‘--force’

Force overwriting of files that already exist.

‘-n’ ‘--dry-run’

Print modifications but don’t perform them. All file copying actions that autopoint would normally execute are inhibited and instead only listed on standard output.

13.6.4.2 Informative output

‘--help’

Display this help and exit.

‘--version’

Output version information and exit.

autopoint supports the GNU gettext versions from 0.10.35 to the current one, 0.21. In order to apply autopoint to a package using a gettext version newer than 0.21, you need to install this same version of GNU gettext at least.

In packages using GNU automake, an invocation of autopoint should be followed by invocations of aclocal and then autoconf and autoheader. The reason is that autopoint installs some autoconf macro files, which are used by aclocal to create aclocal.m4, and the latter is used by autoconf to create the package’s configure script and by autoheader to create the package’s config.h.in include file template.

The name ‘autopoint’ is an abbreviation of ‘auto-po-intl-m4’; in earlier versions, the tool copied or updated mostly files in the po, intl, m4 directories.