UPDATE: I'm working on porting savane's po/ directory to use GNU Autotools' conventions.
PHP (and thus savane) does not care about how the .mo files are generated, just that they are available on the system for use in $(localedir). Most other internationalized applications work like this also, unless you tell them to not be NLS aware. So the build system has much freedom in deciding how to place the i18n and l10n files onto the system. (There is a whole entire directory tree under /usr/local/share/locale dedicated to I18N and L10N). gettext with GNU Autotools here does not provide any obvious advantages when using languages other than C/C++ when in reference to the building and installing aspects. This is in very sharp contrast to c/c++/java/c#, etc languages. So it would not hurt at all to dis-use any "GETTEXT" related macros in aclocal.m4. Going to use configure.ac somehow to make gettext handling consistent package wide to eliminate spaghettin handling of gettext related stuff. Spaghetti is of the devils. The sphagetti code imported from the call to gettextize dumps tons of c/c++ stuff in the srcdir, including forcing use of LIBTOOL macros. Little benefits are seen, and then developer has to put the puzzle where the "C centric" system has to go in the package. I think what the developer did was mostly correct. He added custom code in po/Makefile.am to do the install of the .mo files. This Makefile.am code does all of savane's gettext handling: generating files, updating .po files with new code refs (usually done after edited code), installing (looks scary), uninstalling (looks scary also), and there are some code blocks in there to generate different types of reports for developer purposes. I'll use the old devs route: extended Makefile.am code to drive raw gettext suite tools. I'll port some of his/her codes to use autoconfiscated variables like MKDIR_P and ECHO etc rather than hand written, custom purposed, or guessed stuff. And I'll rig all of this extension code so that it obeys configure.ac and $(top_srcdir)/Makefile.am files, because currently it does not do that. The recommendations in the Autoconf and Automake manuals are a starting guide.
