My build fails because CentOS 5.0 and RHEL 5.0 have an ancient gettext (gettext-0.14.6-4.el5) which doesn’t recognize message contexts (msgctxt). Is there anything I can do to use OBS on these platforms? Gettext 0.15 was released July 2006.
The “easiest” way would be to (re)build newer gettext packages on your target installations (i.e. from src.rpms of a newer CentOS/RHEL release) and provide them in your project.
However, I don’t think this is advisable to provide such packages replacing supported software for this OS by not offcicially supported packages.
Since I assume newer versions of CentOS 5.x and RHEL 5.x ship with newer gettext, I was hoping something else could be done in OBS.
No, OBS builds against the sources provided for a certain version of your target OS, otherwise you could not really build useful packages.
If your project needs newer versions of dependencies than provided by the target OS, you have to add them yourself.
You have to decide for yourself, if this is a good idea, because you will have to maintain and patch (i.e. if there are security issues) the dependent packages, if you decide to add your own versions, especially for an enterprise version, I would leave my hands off it.
If this were a bet I think you would lose on that assumption. I have a RHEL 5.4 server which is up-to-date with packages and the version of gettext on it is gettext-0.14.6-4.el5. Perhaps you have a RHEL machine with an auxiliary repo like rpmforge.