gettext: Flat and Non-Flat
13.1 Flat or Non-Flat Directory Structures
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Some free software packages are distributed as ‘tar’ files which
unpack in a single directory, these are said to be “flat” distributions.
Other free software packages have a one level hierarchy of
subdirectories, using for example a subdirectory named ‘doc/’ for the
Texinfo manual and man pages, another called ‘lib/’ for holding
functions meant to replace or complement C libraries, and a subdirectory
‘src/’ for holding the proper sources for the package. These other
distributions are said to be “non-flat”.
We cannot say much about flat distributions. A flat directory
structure has the disadvantage of increasing the difficulty of updating
to a new version of GNU ‘gettext’. Also, if you have many PO files,
this could somewhat pollute your single directory. Also, GNU
‘gettext’’s libintl sources consist of C sources, shell scripts, ‘sed’
scripts and complicated Makefile rules, which don’t fit well into an
existing flat structure. For these reasons, we recommend to use
non-flat approach in this case as well.
Maybe because GNU ‘gettext’ itself has a non-flat structure, we have
more experience with this approach, and this is what will be described
in the remaining of this chapter. Some maintainers might use this as an
opportunity to unflatten their package structure.
Info Catalog
gettext: Maintainers
gettext: Prerequisites