MinGW: Building Gettext for Windows

GNU gettext is a tool for localizing or translating programs. You don't need it if you only care about English. Get the source here and compile it like this:

./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-threads=win32 --enable-relocatable

cd gettext-runtime

make

make install

Previously I didn't change to the gettext-runtime directory, and the compile took much longer because it built everything. In most cases, only gettext-runtime is needed, so it's okay to type “cd gettext-runtime.” If you need msgfmt.exe, read the bottom of the page.

If you get an error regarding rpl_optind, edit gettext-tools\woe32dll\gettextlib-exports.c as follows:

/* VARIABLE(rpl_optarg)
   VARIABLE(rpl_optind) */

The following files are copied to the system when gettext is installed:

bin/envsubst.exe

bin/gettext.exe

bin/gettext.sh

bin/libasprintf-0.dll

bin/libintl-8.dll

bin/ngettext.exe

include/autosprintf.h

include/libintl.h

lib/libasprintf.*

lib/libintl.*

share/doc/gettext/

share/doc/libasprintf/

share/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES/gettext-runtime.mo

Building Gettext-runtime Statically

Building gettext statically means your program won't look for intl.dll or libintl-8.dll at runtime. Just add the --disable-shared option to configure:

./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-threads=win32 --enable-relocatable --disable-shared

make

cd gettext-runtime/

make install

With static build, We get the following files:

include/autosprintf.h

include/libintl.h

include/localcharset.h

lib/charset.alias

lib/libasprintf.a

lib/libasprintf.la

lib/libintl.a

share/doc/gettext/

share/doc/libasprintf/

My static gettext build is available here.

Static msgfmt, msgmerge and xgettext

Some programs require msgfmt, msgmerge and xgettext during configure. I like to build these tools statically as they won't have dependency on rare libraries like libgettextlib-0-17.dll and libgettextsrc-0-17.dll. After you compile gettext statically following the section above, just copy the tools to /bin:

cp gettext-tools/src/msgfmt.exe /bin
cp gettext-tools/src/msgmerge.exe /bin
cp gettext-tools/src/xgettext.exe /bin
cp gettext-tools/autopoint /bin

Test: Get a message file in *.po format from somewhere and run msgfmt like
this:

msgfmt.exe -o fr.mo fr.po

A binary message file fr.mo will be generated from fr.po in the example above.