Well I don't know what changed but before I was getting errors on ja.po and zh_*.po (and equivalent .gmo files). Now it's en_GB.po that's not playing fair. Googling turned up a foreign language page that mentioned aspell so I updated that. I've also recently slapt-get updated gettext and gettext-tools (which provide msgfmt I gather). I still can't compile ... Making all in po make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/svn/inkscape/po' file=./`echo en_GB | sed 's,.*/,,'`.gmo \ && rm -f $file && /usr/bin/msgfmt -c -o $file en_GB.po en_GB.po:12:27: parse error /usr/bin/msgfmt: en_GB.po: warning: PO file header missing or invalid warning: charset conversion will not work /usr/bin/msgfmt: found 2 fatal errors make[2]: *** [en_GB.gmo] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/svn/inkscape/po' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/svn/inkscape' make: *** [all] Error 2 In fact I've been trying to compile an SVN since before 0.44 came out and haven't yet managed. The only reason I tried in the first place was that the wiki mentions that svn are made to at least compile even if they then bork out. I'm not new to compiling either ... I've rolled my own kernel and can make minor source changes, I've even installed transcode(!) before. Any thoughts on what to do ... perhaps just give up!?