Since intltool 0.40.x, the scripts intltool-merge/update/extract are not copied into the package directory anymore but instead globally installed ones are used. For backward compatibility, these files are only touched in the package directory. (related bugreport http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=537352) So, since these files are empty, patching done in xdt-autogen obviously fail. Right now, I don't have a sane solution since patching /usr/bin/intltool-merge is pretty evil and will fail in most cases since people aren't installing with root permissions. Not to mention problems for distro packagers. But for the long term, was the need of this patching reported upstream? So that it can go into intltool at some point and making the patching unnecessary?
Intltool is fixed upstream. I'm not sure if they've made a release since the fix was committed. Actually yeah, it seems 0.40.5 was released on 8 Oct, and my fix should have gone in around when Pinkie was released, whenever that was. 0.40.4 was released on 19 Sep, so that might have the fix too. But yeah, there's nothing we can do with unfixed 0.40.x versions. For the affected packages, I may bump the intltool version requirements... which sucks, since I imagine quite a few distros won't have it yet, but I'm not sure what else to do.
Thanks for the information, Brian. I manually updated intltool to 0.40.4 and then to 0.40.5, both contain the fix and my generated .desktop files look much better now :). So, it's 'broken' only for intltool version from 0.40.0 to 0.40.3. Maybe the xdt-autogen script could check for the size of intltool-merge.in and if it is 0, then skip patching as it won't succeed in any case.Not sure about the displayed warning, it's still valid for intltool 0.40.0-3 but it's wrong for 0.40.4 and newer. But maybe it's not worth it at all. So, we can close this report.
Yep, I already made that modification in my local tree last night, just haven't committed it yet. Let's leave this open to remind me...
Ok, fix committed. It won't try to patch for 0.40.4 or greater, and for lower 0.40.x releases it prints out a message saying it can't fix things.
Great!