Intltool: A story on how a bug in one piece of software can kill all the others

0.40.6 version of intltool has a nasty bug in handling of LINGUAS variable. It causes localization (i.e .mo files) not to be built if your LINGUAS environment variable is set (I have it set to “tr”). At first, the issue popped up in GNOME packages (nautilus, seahorse and probably quite more that was fixed before I noticed) And now it started hitting other applications with tarballs generated using broken intltool. I first noticed it in Liferea, and then came Geany.

So users, upstream developers and downstream maintainers; if you notice or you’re reported of a package that appears untranslated even though the package has translations (langcode.po) please report it (for users), fix your tarball for the next release (upstream), fix your package (downstream)